Drakken vs Manliness
by purplegirl761
Summary: A week until Thanksgiving. A potential father figure to impress. A six-day plan for manliness. What could go wrong?
1. The First Call

**I'm ba-ack! :D **

**Kinda a weird idea for a story coming from a female, but I guess I got tired of seeing how weight-lifting ads and romance novels define "manliness." Plus, I saw great comic potential in trying to tackle the subject with Drakken as my ever-faithful guinea pig.  
**

**Grammar errors and the occasional non-word are meant to capture Drakken's "voice." And credit for the title goes to the ever-amazing _Gravity Falls_.**

**()()()()()**

Chapter One

The First Call

He puts his finger on the little white calendar square that marks today and carefully slides it - his finger, that is - down to the square directly below, the one that says "Thanksgiving Day" in letters almost too tiny to read. The thought brings on a grin.

Thanksgiving, his fourth-favorite holiday - well, fifth-favorite if you count his birthday. Thanksgiving, with its warm ovens making everyone feel cozy, even if it's below freezing outside. Its tables piled high with more food than even _he _can eat. The parade of blow-up things that look like they'd be so much fun to bounce on. The football games his henchmen always watched, which he never understood - what's the point of running around head-butting each other to gain some brown oblong thing - unless it's hollowed out and contains encoded information that could send you to prison if translated -

He shakes that idea away with a toss of his ponytail. Ah, well. Three out of four ain't bad.

And this year's going to be even better than most. He rubs his hands together in glee, the way mad scientists do, even if they've been reformed for almost six whole months. As long as he can remember, he's had two Thanksgiving dinners - one with Shego and the henchmen on the actual day, and one with his mother the following weekend. He always liked the first one - noisy and crazy like family dinners should be, with talking and laughing and fighting the henchmen over the wishbone. The second, on the other hand - well, he shudders just to think about it.

He's always up for extending the celebration, but it wasn't much of a celebration with just the two of them. Her cooing over him and reminding him she wants grandbabies and urging him to eat more turkey, which by this point was the _last _thing he wanted to do. Him sitting with his legs pressed together like he has to pee, chomping his tongue so he won't let anything slip out that'll reveal he's a supervillain.

Remembering that feels cold and lonely, but _this _year is a different story, and that perks him back up. This year, _both _of his families - the biological one and the evil one that's not really evil anymore - are coming together to celebrate. Mother will be there with her homemade pumpkin pie - cause she's the best cook in the universe - and his former henchmen will be there with board games - one of them has a Clue set from 1960 or something that he thinks might be worth a million bucks - and Shego will be there to just be Shego, ah, oh, the fun they'll have together! Makes him go all tingly inside.

He pictures them now, all snug around the table, shoveling in spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and cranberries, hunched over a game of Sorry! as they cackle hysterically at sending each other back to Start. His grin gets bigger when he thinks about how good it feels getting the last blue piece to Home while everyone else is still struggling around the board - and even bigger when he realizes he doesn't really care right now. He can get knocked back a hundred times and he'll only pout a little, because he'll be surrounded by people who love him.

At _his_ house. He's going to be the host, which is the best part! He can see himself now, sitting at the head of the table, asking the blessing, carving the turkey - which will actually be a full-sized bird this year instead of those pathetic little dinky ones you have to buy when you're a family of two. Just thinking about it makes his mouth water - and his fingers tingle nervously, because he doesn't exactly have the best track record with sharp things.

But there's still somebody missing from the picture, someone to sit next to his mother and beam and say proudly, "That's my son that saved the world!"

He sucks in air between his teeth. It's moments like this when he understands why he stayed a supervillain for so long, even though he was never any good at it. It was so much easier to just blow up whatever hurt him.

How, he wonders, can you miss what you're not sure you ever had? Like a relationship with your dad -

_Dad_. The familiarity the word implies gives him the creeps. Somewhere out there is a man who impregnated his mother, but he is _not _his dad. Not the way men in Hallmark movies are to their kids or the way Dr. Possible - much as he's still not fond of the man - is to Kim, or the way Senior is to Junior.

An iota of an idea - say THAT ten times fast - sparks at the base of his brain, and he closes his eyes to let the thoughts spill into place. He sees the Seniors at their gigantic private island compound, carving a scrawny turkey, even though they could afford one that weighs forty pounds and comes pre-stuffed. Somewhere in his mind he hears a voice say, _Thanksgiving isn't much fun with just one parent and one kid, is it?_ And he remembers the warmth of Senior looking at him with something more than respect -

The idea speck shoots down his spinal column, sending a jolt to every part of his body. He leaps to his feet and does a little Russian kicking dance with them, for no reason other than they're too excited to stay still.

Those overjoyed feet carry him from his bedroom to his office, where he rustles through notes about overdue library books and blueprints for Shego's Christmas present - a portable force field - until he finds last year's copy of Jack Hench's Villain Directory. He's been meaning to throw it out since the day of the U.N. ceremony just for him. Now he's so glad he didn't.

He tears back to his room, fumbles his cell phone out of his pocket, taps in the numbers with trembling fingers, and then immediately crosses them as it begins to ring. He's in the middle of hoping he won't choke on his own saliva or something equally undignified when the ringing stops. A voice that sounds just old enough to be comforting answers, "Hello, the Seniors' private island."

Suddenly he doesn't know where to rest the hand that's not holding the phone. Senior has politeness down to a science, but he's still learning, and his voice sounds kind of shaky and squeaky when he says, "Hello. Um - this - this is Dr. Drakken."

"Dr. Drakken! What a pleasure!" Senior says welcomingly, like he's just been _waiting _for him to call. "How may I help you?"

He takes a moment to gather up the words and let them out. "I was wondering if you - and Junior -" _thank you, thank you for letting me remember Junior_, he adds silently, not sure if he's talking to God or his own memory - "would be interested in attending my family's Thanksgiving dinner. I know it's just the two of you, and that's no fun on the holidays - I know because it always used to be my mother and I -"

Things start to go tangly - he didn't plan on saying all of that - so he decides to stop there, because who knows what might come out of his mouth next? Senior smooths over the silence with that way he has of saying everything perfectly. "How kind of you to offer," the older man replies. "Although we do not generally observe Thanksgiving -"

He chomps down on his tongue to keep from blurting a "Wha?" that would sound even goonier after Senior's warm, rich speech. It drops on him like a cartoon anvil - Thanksgiving is an _American_ holiday. The Seniors are _European_. That's why they have those accents that make them sound like royalty and those little squiggles over the _n_ in "Senor" when they write out their names -

Jerking his head around neck-poppingly fast, he studies the shiny golden medals hanging on his wall, one for winning the Evil Family Pie-Eating contest five years in a row, the other for saving the world, until the pinch between his shoulder blades that feels like he did something lame goes away. It's about halfway gone when Senior talks again and sends it, along with all of his other aches and doubts, scurrying away.

"-we would be delighted to celebrate with you and your family," is how Senior finishes. He actually does sound delighted, in a calm sort of way, and it makes his own more-excitable sense of delight race through his veins like a sugar rush. The man pauses briefly before adding, "May I offer my most heartfelt thanks to you for thinking of us?"

If he's not mistaken, Senior's voice thickens, and for a second he feels bad that this isn't really all about them. "Yes," he answers, even though it might be a rhetorical question. "Yes, you may."

"So when is this grand feast being held?" Senior asks.

"A week from today - because that's Thanksgiving - though I'm sure you knew that -" He chomps his tongue again so he won't add "because you know everything." He definitely doesn't want to sound like some little starstruck teenager who's finally getting the chance to meet Brittina - if she's even still popular - it's been quite a while since he last snuck a peek into the teen world. Personally, he'd rather meet someone like Albert Einstein or Marie Curie, but -

But he's getting off track again. He shakes himself and continues, "Four o'clock Middleton time. . . that would be. . . I don't know what that would be your time. . . " He trails off and gives a jerky shrug, even though Senior can't see it. Makes him feel better. "Does that work for you?" His vocal cords wobble like a fifteen-year-old kid's, which is embarrassing, but he knows Senior doesn't care.

"Please hold on momentarily," Senior says as professionally as if he's been a customer-service representative at some point. "I will check."

There's a putting-the-phone-down silence that feels centuries long but, according to his watch, only lasts forty-five seconds. He scowls briefly - he hates it when his feelings don't line up with science - and then tries to distract himself by imagining what Senior's doing. Probably going to go check a calendar or maybe one of those nice thick planners with the giant squares you can actually _write _on, no doubt already filled out for the rest of the year. Senior's organized like that.

Speaking of Senior, he picks the phone back up just as he's beginning to run out of patience and tells him they can come. "Yes, it appears that we have no other obligations on that date," are his exact words, and he couldn't be happier if Senior were telling him he'd won the lottery.

He thrusts a fist in the air like the champion he just might be after all and starts to cry "Boo-yah!" But then he remembers that nobody likes to be yelled at over the phone, especially not someone as distinguished as Senior, and he cuts himself off at the first syllable.

"I mean - okay, that's great," he coughs with what he hopes is even a fraction of Senior's dignity. "It's going to be at my house. My _new_ house in Middleton," he adds, straightening his spine into proud-host posture. "That's 1076 Ward Avenue." Shego calls it "the looney Ward," but now that he's not being tailed by the police 24/7, it's nice to be able to give out an address.

"Ward. . . Avenue . . ." Senior repeats slowly. He hears a pen scratching across paper, and he's sure that must have been exactly what it sounded like when they signed the Declaration of Independence. "Will we need to bring anything? A dish, a dessert. . ."

He starts laughing for no real reason, except the fact that there'll be two more places around his table next week. They'll all have to squeeze in a little tighter, but it'll be totally worth it! "No, the food's already been taken care of," the one part of his brain that's not dissolving with relief makes him say. "Just bring your appetites!" That's something Mother always says, and it gives him that host-y sensation again, and he breaks back into laughter, just because it feels good.

Senior laughs too, a crackly chuckle that vibrates through you and tells you you're safe. He wonders if that's what a father's laugh should sound like.

"I will bring mine -" and if it were anyone but Senior, he'd picture him wiggling his eyebrows here - "and I can tell you Junior will most assuredly bring his." Each word is as precise as a master chemist's measurements, and he sighs a little to himself. He could sit here and listen to Senior talk all day if he didn't have to go to work.

But he does, so he needs to get off, so he clears his throat to finish this. The longer you wait, the harder it'll get - like taking off a Band-Aid. "So - I'll see you then?" It comes out as a question, because he still can't quite get himself to believe this is really happening.

He can imagine Senior lifting his hand in acknowledgment - it's always so cool when he does that. "Until then, Dr. Drakken," he answers. He's sure he hears a twinkle in Senior's eye somewhere in there, even though that's not anatomically possible.

He hangs up the phone, in a daze brought on by exposure to such pure gentleman. . . ly. . . ship. Senior even knows how to say good-bye in just the right way, and it makes him search through his brain for something more formal than "Toodles." The best he can come up with is "May the Force be with you," and it doesn't seem quite the same.

Not that any of that matters, once it hits him - in spurts, because his brain can only handle so much awesomeness at once. _The Seniors! - are coming! - to spend Thanksgiving! with us!_

_With _me_!_

Now he _does_ thrust his fists in the air like a football player who just scored a home run and holler "Boo-yah!" at the top of his lungs. Then he collapses onto the bed with joy, wraps both arms around his belly, and giggles hysterically. This is the best thing ever - well, okay, he's not so sure about _that_. So many wonderful things have happened since the night of the alien invasion that it's hard to rank them. But this is definitely way up there.

He closes his eyes again, ceasing to laugh only because he's running out of air, and Photoshops the Seniors into his mental image of the family celebration. He isn't quite sure where Junior fits in, so he sticks him behind the potted mini-tree in one corner. Senior, though - he knows right where to put him. In the place of honor, right next to Mother - who he'll treat like a queen, not like the creep who left her -

He stops all of a sudden and his thoughts ram into each other and fall down, leaving him dizzy. Needs air. Air is important. How has it never occurred to him, in thirty-four years, that the evilest man he knows abandoned somebody else besides him? In fact, she was probably primarily the one being abandoned. Nobody ever gets divorced just because they don't want to see their kid anymore.

The realization, as logical as it is, makes him want to zip over to Connecticut or wherever the stupid job transferred him and pummel the guy's face with his fists, even though he's never done anything like that before. How could anyone desert his mother, so good and sweet and pure? All right, so she can be pretty annoying with her cheek-pinching and cooey gushing, but it's not worth breaking her heart over. That's why he never wanted her to find out he was a supervillain. Well, that and the fact that he'd be sent to bed without dessert for the rest of his life.

He sits there for a minute or two, knees hugged up to his achy chest, his whole life lumping up in his throat. Mother deserves a life so much better than what she has. Especially considering her only son doesn't trust himself to provide for her, since he's almost as much of a workaholic as the jerk she was once married to and doesn't always remember how much she needs him. No, she should have someone who'll never forget to bring her flowers on Mother's Day, who'll take care of her as she gets older and wake her up with a good-morning kiss.

Had anyone _ever _done that? He shudders again at the thought of his mother's soft, sweet lips even brushing those of his fath - her ex-husband. Her trusting him, leaning on him, bearing his child -

The old hatred burns up his back like his vertebrae are on fire. He tries to force his mind to something else, because he's been known to try to annihilate whole continents when he's hating someone that badly. It spirals away in freefall and lands on the thought that Mother must be as lonely for a husband as he is for a father.

_Wait a minute. . . _

A tingly feeling grips his whole head like the one you get in your nose when you need to sneeze and a sneeze won't come. A plan is tapping its way in up there, a _brilliant _one. He knows what it is - he can _sense_ what it is, but he can't figure out how to say it, even to himself.

What he _can_ see is the picture he's created of the perfect Thanksgiving. The tingle zooms in on Mother and Senior and draws a perfect, pink heart around them.

_That's it!_

He leaps to his feet - on the bed - he tries to yell "Of course!", but it comes out "Ob clod!" because his tongue is so amazed by this revelation that it forgets its way around his mouth. He arches his neck a little to improve the blood flow to his brain, so it won't get overwhelmed, too.

He'll set Senior up with his mother! His chin tilts a few degrees upward like it always does when he's thought of something this bragworthy. He hasn't researched the subject himself, but he remembers hearing somewhere that a statistically significant amount of people just love it when old people get married. "Inspiring," they call it. And it'll fix everything - Mother will have somebody to look out for her, and he won't have to pretend anymore, because Senior will really be -

He stops. No, he's not going to say it, not even going to _think_ it, until it's real. Can't jinx it. Even after saving the world and reforming and realizing that he didn't need to force everybody on Earth to recognize his genius, this hope's still as fragile as silence. One whisper-thought, and it'll shatter like glass.

For now, just knowing it's going to happen will be enough to push Thanksgiving up several more notches on the list of Best Things Ever. And he knows it. He'll have to play matchmaker, which isn't a hat he's worn often - but he can do it. After all, who did he trap under the mistletoe that one Christmas at the North Pole? And who wound up a couple not even eighteen months later? Hmm?

Now _that's _inspiring. So much so that he yells "Yieeet!" - another cry too excited to form itself into words - and slams his fist down on his nightstand the way he always did when world domination seemed to be within his grasp. This time, like ninety-five percent of the time in the past, the darkened wood catches his hand at just the right angle.

The _wrong _angle. A nerve on the side that's basically the manual version of the funny bone.

Pain makes his whole hand warm and fuzzy, the kind of pain where you have to grind your teeth and hiss to stay inside your own skin. He pulls his hand to his chest and cradles it with his other hand, and it throbs and throbs like a scolding. Tears well in his eyes, just because it _hurts _so much.

Even as he's biting back a series of whimpers, he hears a voice - with his memory, not his ears. It's been so long since he actually heard it that he doesn't really remember what it sounds like, but he knows it has a hard, angry edge because it's annoyed with him. _Suck it up,_ the man who fathered him says. _Be a man._

Of course. Richard Lipsky - that's his name, right? Richard? - never had any patience for crying fits. How many times had he scolded him for wailing like a baby when he was six whole years old - or seven - or eight? How many times had he heard him complaining about how often Mother cried and wanted to scream at him, "If you weren't such a jerk to her, she wouldn't cry so much!"?

All his muscles stiffen, and he swipes a sleeve across his nose, which is suddenly runny and has gone all tender in pre-tears mode. Just like that, he doesn't feel very much like a champion anymore.

_Be a man_. He doesn't even know exactly what that means. Watching football? Playing football? At least having hands big enough to _hold _a football?

He glances at himself in the full-length mirror on the wall across from his dresser and pictures his dad, a dark-haired Eddy in a business suit. The thought upsets his tummy and plants deep wrinkles in his forehead. Why couldn't he have gotten the creep's body instead of his addiction to his work?

His father's genes got him to five-foot-nine-and-a-half, but his mother's made him stop there. He scowls at his reflection like that'll change its size and shape. At one point, he would have classified himself as "lean-yet-sturdy," a perfectly masculine look. But prison stripped him of any hint of muscle, and eighteen months later he still looks breakable, with ribs he just barely can't see anymore and shoulders that need pads to look square and strong now.

It's Eddy he sees now, all sharp cuts and points and muscle-bulging line segments, his chin a perfect right angle. Not like his cousin, who's so crazily out of proportion he looks like someone stretched his entire torso out on a torture rack, then slapped it on a pair of runty little legs and added two arms apparently snatched from an ape going through puberty for good measure. His cousin, who's pointy everywhere a man should be firm, smooth muscle and soft everywhere a man should be pointy.

His jaw's rounded in a way he likes because it reminds him of Mother's, but it sure doesn't look manly. He _does _have the jutting Lipsky cheekbones, but on a face that long and oval and hairless, they seem ridiculous, rather than masculine. And his belly is definitely plumper than it was at this time last year. He can only imagine how it'll look _after _Thanksgiving.

Now the room seems cold, and he shivers even though he's used to dark, dank lairs meant to chill you to the bone. (He's not quite sure what "dank" means, but it sounds good and it goes well with "dark.")

His dad - _Richard_, he corrects himself - is the only person he's ever known who didn't pig out on Thanksgiving. Staying in shape was really important to him - he went to the gym every day on his lunch hour. And the day after Thanksgiving, he'd always come home laughing at some guys with red faces and round tummies running on treadmills like they thought the things could actually take them somewhere. "Doing penance," he would call it. He, himself, never understood what the man meant. Now he thinks he does.

For the first time in his life, he sucks in his stomach. And he immediately feels like he lost something precious that he'll never be able to get back.

Every Thanksgiving, as reliable as a comet passing through the Earth's atmosphere, he stuffs himself until he can barely walk. That shouldn't be making his knees wobble the way they are - everybody pigs out on Thanksgiving, he reminds himself. But it's not just Thanksgiving with him. It's Christmas, Easter, Halloween, restaurant buffets, church potlucks. . .

Church. Now that's a whole different can of soup. It's a big, square, happily-worn-down building full of the high ceilings that he always loved so much in a lair and friendly people he wishes he'd met earlier. He feels right at home there - until he makes a mistake.

Even then, most of the people are still really nice to him. But there's this one lady, a little old one like his mother - only she's nothing like Mother, except that they can both make you feel guiltier than a unanimous jury. She's always pursing her lips and "tsk, tsk"ing whenever he drinks more than his fair share of sacred grape juice - because those little glasses were so small, he thought he was _supposed _to take three or four - or claps his hands over his ears whenever anyone mentions the devil - because he's seeing little cartoon action figures turning into monsters straight from hell - or blurts out "how come?" in Sunday school - because five months of church doesn't erase twenty-three years as a supervillain. And "a whole different can of soup" isn't a real expression, is it?

Hmmm. Can of beans. Can of fish. Nope. Still doesn't sound right.

Anyway, the Tsk-Tsk Lady goes around after those potluck dinners clucking her tongue at the guys who lie around groaning that they ate too much. He's not sure what rule _that_'s breaking - he still doesn't know all these things - but he knows _ugh-you're-a-pig_ disgust anywhere. He used to see it on his own face when he'd yell at the henchmen for being too heavy to succeed at Stealth Mode, back before he was fat himself for, like, twelve hours and experienced the shame that cut so deep he thought for sure he'd die. It seems to work on the potluck-pigger-outers, too, because it's never the same people each time.

Except him. Always him. Those last couple times, the Tsk-Tsk Lady's started clucking and pursing as soon as he walks in the door of a potluck - to save time.

And if Richard P. Lipsky saw him, he knows he'd do much worse than that.

. . . and, oh yeah - Father's Day. He's eaten himself sick on the third Sunday in June as far back as he can remember, because part of him felt achingly empty, as if someone had scooped out all the stuff that was supposed to be in there. He can diagram the human anatomy in near-perfect detail, but he's never been good at identifying a source for those interior pains, so he assumed it came from his stomach and he was hungry. Which was a perfectly logical conclusion, but now he's not convinced it was the right one.

They talked about something like this once on one of those radio talk shows he used to listen to every now and then just so he'd be able to answer Mother's questions about his "job." "Emotional eating," the good doctor on there called it, and the people he talked to had said stuff that made perfect sense - about mistaking an empty feeling in your chest for one in your stomach, about food never letting you down, about warm, soft, sweet things reminding you of being safe at home with your mother.

Those things were as familiar to him as the sound of his own voice, but he'd never figured out a way to _say_ them. Every single one of those people must have been the wordish version of a genius.

Only one problem. They were all _women_.

Not that there's anything wrong with being a woman. . . unless you're supposed to be a man. Dr. What's-His-Nose had even said that some men - but not very many - ate emotionally, though they were more likely to crave a nice juicy steak or a hamburger.

He's never craved a steak in his life. It's always been sweets all the way.

_Be a man_? Yeah, right.

And it's hard to look at himself anymore. He closes his eyes, hoping that when he opens them again he'll be staring into the face of someone who absolutely oozes masculinity. But no. Just a skinny, baby-faced man-child, and when he blinks, he can almost see Drew Lipsky - glasses, corpse-pale skin, the only kid in the world who managed to have an underbite and an overbite at the same time.

It skips through his mind then, tightening his veins in the not-good way he remembers from his villain days. Richard Lipsky wanted a son who was athletic and popular and tough - as much a man-in-training as a third-grader could be. Not like him. It's a thought he's had so many times that he was sure it had gotten to the point where it couldn't hurt him anymore. Even now, all he feels is a slight ache on one side of his heart, surrounded by a numbness that's frightening in and of itself.

Logically, scientifically, he knows his non-dad didn't leave because of him. But as he searches his own anxious gaze in the mirror, he can't help but wonder - did he make it _easier _for him to leave?

He sags against the mirror, a gumball pressing at his throat, but he's too used-up to cry over this by now. He slips his eyes shut again, just to get those pesky emotions in order, and in a moment that threatens to burst his heart into shards, he thinks he might see the face of the man who gave him a Y chromosome and black hair and dark eyes and absolutely nothing else.

It's gone with a breath-in-breath-out, though, replaced by the image of Senior. Senior, the dignified and well-bred and proud, watching him gorge himself on repulsive unmanliness at Thanksgiving dinner - and being driven away forever.

Okay, maybe that's a tad harsh. Senior will keep being polite to him, because Senior's polite to everyone. He'll probably even stay his friend. But he won't be proud of him and want to be his -

He cuts himself off with a sharp snap of his head, wrenching his brain back into his control. No, he can't think like that or he'll spin back down into the panic and the so-aloneness and the self-pity that drove him to become a supervillain in the first place. At least that's what his therapist says.

_So this is not the time to freak out_, he tells himself. _It's the time for cold hard facts. Those _he can do: Senior's coming over to his house next week to celebrate. If he eats - well, the way he always eats on Thanksgiving he'll disgust Senior, and he can forget about him falling in love with Mother. Pigging out could ruin everything.

The solution _seems_ simple. "Okay, so I won't," he tells his reflection. It doesn't look like it believes him. His gut shifts uneasily, and he hasn't even filled it to bursting yet.

So - he'll watch Senior and just copy what he eats, which'll probably be a nice, reasonable one serving of everything, not three or four. Surely someone as classy as Senior never gets indigestion. He's certainly too much of a gentleman for overeating.

Okay - good plan. His chest heaves with a sigh of relief and he watches it in the mirror, remembering how that used to make his chest muscles swell into a hump. But those muscles were thinned by prison, and now he has the physique of an ironing board. All right, so he's not quite as flat as he was when he first busted out - was that really over a year ago? - but sometimes he wonders if he'll ever get his pectorals back.

Well, he technically still _has _them - everyone possesses a set, unless they're a mutant or something. They're just not _defined _anymore. To be honest, they probably never _were _defined, not the way Richard Lipsky's were - and probably still are. He's afraid to peel off his shirt and check on the six-pack situation.

What's up with this? he wonders, even as he flexes a bicep in his best He-Man pose and only achieves the slight curve of a linear-model graph. He thought he came to terms with his looks a long time ago. He begins a scowl that causes the tendons in his neck to set hard. Remembering Richard always turns everything all kerflooey.

_Brains, not brawn_, he reminds himself, the way he has ever since about second grade, when the kids first discovered how different it was to be smaller and slower and smarter. Carl Thompson and his mini-henchmen may have been able to throw a ball through the big-kids' hoop, but they didn't have a clue that that ball and that hoop were constructed of atoms until their science book told them the next year, and by then he'd moved on to basic chemical formulas.

It's not even that they were stupid, much as he hates to admit that. They just weren't as smart as _him_.

He squirms a little, somehow feeling like he's in the wrong skin. That sounded a bit too much like the old Drakken, the evil one with the ego problem. But he doesn't need to be better than everyone else anymore because he knows he's just as good. It was his scientific knowledge that gave him the powers that saved the world, it's what makes him a valuable asset to Global Justice, and it's what's going to impress Senior.

Grabbing his blue backpack by its one functional strap, he hoists it over his left shoulder and straightens them both, as if to shrug off his doubts. Yeah - he's saved the world. Reformed. Done his best to right his old wrongs and make amends with his former enemies.

He's got nothing left to prove.

()()()()()()()

Some good hard work turned out to be just the thing he needed. All thoughts of Senor Senior, Sr. and Richard Lipsky and the Tsk-Tsk Lady were vaporized the minute he stepped into Lab 591 and heard the chemical concoctions bubbling happily inside their beakers. He's as safe and secure in a laboratory as a bee is in a hive, and just as productive. In fact, he decides as he skips out toward the hovercraft, gazing up at the sky that's already starting to turn dark and starry since it's the end of November, he'd say today was a better-than-average day at Global Justice.

They experimented with the truth serum that _he _helped perfect - not to brag or anything. Tested it in its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, marking each one's potency and storage convenience and ease of transport, and whether or not you can hide it in something else. They'll work on that for weeks, probably double-checking and triple-checking everything. Sometimes he gets tired of all those tests - wants to get out there and _do_ something with all that info - but he's made enough foolish mistakes, especially in his career as a villain, to know why they're so important.

And when Professor Richardo looked over his notes at the end of the day, he said he hadn't made any transcribing errors. Somebody always has to check what he jots down, because his brilliant-yet-dyslexic brain has a tendency to rearrange letters and numbers. A measure of 5.8 milliliters might be written as "8.5 lillimeters," and when you work with powerful compounds like the truth serum, that kind of mix-up can be dangerous. But they never make him feel stupid about it. Nobody at Global Justice ever treats him like he's incompetent - except that arrogant little Will Du, and from what he's heard, the kid does that to _every_one.

He stops by the library to return some items, the latest Oh Boyz CD and a video documentary on the life of Alfred Nobel and an overdue sci-fi novel he finally finished, leaving him feeling like he'd won a battle against a worthy opponent. He drops them with a satisfying thunk in the returns box and then wanders over to the magazine shelf, trying to appear sage as he scans the rack for the latest issue of _Nano-Tech._

But it's not there, just a big empty off-white space between _Macho_ and _Organic Living_. It reminds him of a smile with one very important tooth missing, and he sags down in the nearest squishy-backed chair until he's eye-to-eye with the model - can you say that about men? - on the cover of _Macho_.

The guy's shirtless, of course, making his own upper body feel cold and exposed, and he hugs his arms around himself as he studies the gorilla-like chest and six-pack you could store sodas in. He's about to react with his customary snort and the reassurance that _Nobody really looks like that_, but that suddenly seems like very faulty reasoning. This man really looks like that - unless they digitally enhanced him. Which he knows is a distinct possibility because they did it to him for his shampoo commercial. . .

It's the words dangling next to the guy's perfect brawny elbow that catch his attention, however. His dyslexia doesn't scramble the letters this time, and for once he wishes it would. Written in thick black type meant to gloat to him, they say, "Brains beat brawn? Maybe not. See page 36."

How can that not be aimed directly at him? The safe ground he found to stand on this morning is now red-hot and covered with holes than ooze lava, and he actually hops on one foot over to the magazine shelf so they won't grab him.

He snatches _Macho_ up in a desperate grip that he hasn't used since the day he reformed and shakes it to change what it's saying, which he knows is downright irrational and yet can't stop himself from doing. If anything, the man on the cover's smirk grows cockier, so he has to flip the magazine open and escape it. His veins are getting tighter, and the one on his left temple threatens to pulsate right into a migraine.

It falls open to page 19, and for a moment he's so flustered he doesn't remember if that comes before or after 36. His belly gives a brief, blender-like churn.

Once he locates page 36, he can only stop and gape. Spread across the glossy pages are tons of men - and they're every inch _men_, with muscles like tough steak and the rugged hints of five o'clock shadows - which on him would be more accurately named noon-the-next-day shadows. He feels his entire body turning into one giant thumb.

At least the pictures kindly break up the text into little hunks his brain can mostly manage. It says, "We've all heard the old adages 'brains, not brawn' and 'mind over matter'."

A-ha! So an "adage" must be a saying. He files that away in his Mental Dictionary of Neat Words.

"But how well do they hold up in reality?" the article continues. "Our staff randomly surveyed single women from everywhere from Hollywood to Lizard Lick on what they're most attracted to in a man."

Now _there_'s a topic he knows basically nothing about. Also - who or what is Lizard Lick? Sounds like a reptile-transmitted disease that you'd wish on your worst enemies.

"What they found may surprise you."

The blender whirs to life in his belly again. He has a feeling that's not going to be a _good _surprise.

"Sparrow Ditsch, a 19-year-old college student, had this to say: 'I like a guy with brains as much as the next girl. I mean, I'm certainly not going to date a stupid one. But don't count muscles out. After all, chemistry is important too, and _no_ woman is attracted to a skinny little nerd with glasses.'"

The blender begins to puree stuff that's already partly digested, and it leaves him a little light-headed. What about a skinny little nerd with contacts?

Actually, he's confused. She says chemistry is important - and then writes off nerdy guys? Doesn't she realize that most of the people who agree with her on the subject's significance fall into the "nerd" category? His logical, scientific brain takes over immediately, trying to turn what he just read to mincemeat. But in the secret place where Dr. Drakken hides his insecurities, he's afraid.

The sentences that follow, though written in the same plain black type that's almost too small for him as the others, seem to rise up to meet him in sizzling orange letters. "Hope Less, a 35-year-old journalist, added, 'Muscles definitely aren't the only thing that matters, but I want the guy I go out with to at least be in decent shape. Come on, there's more unattractive than a man with a spare tire!'"

Why? It shows he's prepared in case of a flat.

The article doesn't bother answering him, however. It just continues with, "Perhaps the most telling answer came from Misty Meaner, a 28-year-old graphic designer. She told _Macho_, 'Women have evolved to be drawn to buff men, because we know they're the ones who are strong and healthy. Just like we're biologically predisposed to revulsion towards the overweight because we know they could drop dead of a heart attack any second. And the rail-thin guys? They wouldn't last a _day _in the wild. It's nature's way - survival of the fittest.'"

Um. Gee. Well. What's he supposed to say to _that_ - someone who says she can scientifically prove he's not a man? Except he hasn't seen any proof yet. He's no biologist, but what she's saying sounds pretty fishy. And even though he can kind of see where she's coming from on some things, she didn't cite any sources, which are a must if you want anyone to believe you.

_He _sure doesn't believe her. _Can't_ believe her. Science cannot betray him like this.

Then those pathetic excuses for muscles start seizing and jittering as if an electrical current is jolting through them. Something has jumped into his head, something he can't kick out no matter how hard he tries. This article's talking about what women are most drawn to in a boyfriend - but what if it's true for fathers and sons, too?

Something sandy seems to coat his lungs, and then he's shaking in the grip of the first real panic attack he's had since he's reformed. His heart's broken into jagged pieces, and the edges keep poking him. He doesn't know which emotion's settling so heavy in his throat - anger, fear, indignityation - but he's sure it'll kill him.

His eyes swim across the page, moisture blurring his gaze. As freaked out as he is, it might as well all be in mirror writing - except a couple lines that jump - shazaam! - right off the page.

"But for those of you who don't measure up as men, there's still hope! With our 6-day Man Plan, you too can become a babe magnet and impress Senior so much at Thanksgiving dinner that he'll beg to join your family."

He blinks against the burn that's turning his contacts into weapons of toxicity. Sure enough, those last words aren't really there. But they're branded into his brain, clawing at the edges of the logical-thinking skills would be able to reason them away.

Still, he has to give those skills credit for trying. They tell him that Senior would never beg for anything. Ask politely, yes, but not get down on his knees and clasp his hands together and whine the way he, Drakken, has been known to do when he doesn't get his way -

He gives that thought a hard punch to shut it up temporarily and then jams his mind Thanksgiving-afternoon-full so there's no room for it come back in. All right, so Senior won't beg. But he'll be proud. So proud.

He battles a breath, fights to exhale it without choking or sobbing. He pictures the _that's-my-boy _gleam Mother gets in her eyes when he so much as remembers to wipe his feet on the doormat before coming in. And he tries to transfer it to the image he has of Senior's eyes, but his father's face keeps popping up in between and knocking it away so he'll never be able to see.

Richard Lipsky's features are smudged, because his memory doesn't work so well that far back. But he knows beyond the doubts of shadows - whatever those are - that they're oozing the exact opposite of pride.

Raw waves of pain lap at his ulcer, and he clutches the magazine to his chest, trying to keep from going under. He grapples with the words _six day Man Plan, six day Man Plan_, until it hits him what they're actually saying.

Six days! That's exactly the number sandwiched between today and Thanksgiving! He glances frantically back down at the article to check that he's not hallucinating. Nope, there it is, in letters so big and clear even _he _can't mangle them: SIX DAYS TO MANHOOD.

And it's splashed above the pictures of dozens of men that only strength his resolve to be just like them. They're in everything from swimsuits and suits and ties, and their skin ranges from medium-rare to deep, dark brown, but they all stand the same way - proudly, with their big shoulders thrown back. No matter how hard he looks, he can't see a single similarity between them and what he saw in the mirror this morning, and it nags at his self-esteem like a mosquito bite in some unreachable place. A song he heard in a movie a long time ago dances through his head:

_For there's no one as burly and brawny_

_As you can see, I've got biceps to spare_

_Not a bit of him's scraggly or scrawny_

_And every last inch of me's covered with HAIR!_

Speaking of hair, he gives the page another quick scan to make sure wearing it a certain way isn't a requirement. Doesn't look like it. Some of the Gastons have cuts so short they look like they belong in the army, but he sees one equally macho-looking man with waves that come to just below his shoulder blades, like his own. Phew. He's not sure he'd be able to subject himself to anything more than a trim, even for the sake of manliness. His neck freaks out without his ponytail to protect it.

The longer he gazes at the Gastons, the smaller he feels, and he has to jut his chin out to keep from hollowing out inside. Something in his spirit, though, warms to an idea.

He's got six days. _Any_thing can happen in six days! A lot of the people at church say a whole _world_ could be made in six days. Some say it would take a lot longer, but he doesn't really see why it matters, especially not now.

What _matters _is making a good impression on Senior, and this article just might be - _has_ to be - the ticket. It's like performing a chemistry experiment that's already been well-documented by hundred of scientists. Just gather the right ingredients and follow the instructions, and something amazing will happen.

Palms still secreting sweat, he closes the magazine, smooths the cover that must have gotten crumpled when he was deciding whether to cling to it or rip it to shreds, and starts to bound off toward the check-out counter. After two skips, he comes to a halt so abrupt it almost plants him nose-first on the threadbare carpet. He doesn't know exactly how men are supposed to carry themselves across a room, so he settles on a nice brisk walk. His lab coat swishes between his legs, and he feels more masculine already.

He slides his library card and the magazine across the counter with precision and gives the librarian his biggest, friendliest smile when she hands them back, just so _she_'llsmile at _him_. He went so long without being smiled at when he was trying to conquer the world that now he likes to keep track of every grin he gets. This lady's about sixty-five or so, and the wrinkles by her mouth crease when she smiles at him. He decides he likes that almost as much as when a baby dimples at you and shows all four of their teeth.

As he pushes the button to open the door, just because he loves doing that, another smile - this one a secret one, meant just for him - slips across his face. He's got the secret to manhood tucked in his backpack and hope working on pounding out the dents in his ego. He has to keep an eye on that thing, because if it gets too small, he used to blow it up all big, and that's when people got hurt.

Yeah, by this time next week, he'll finally be a real man, like Alfred Nobel and Richard Lipsky and the Gastons. And Senior. If Senior's not in a category all his own, somewhere beyond "man."

He imagines the look on Senior's face when he greets him on Thanksgiving with all his scraggly, scrawny bits pruned into the form of a man. He's been very into gardening metaphors ever since he basically became part plant. "Why, Dr. Drakken," he'll say. "Have you been working out? You seem. . . bigger somehow. Manlier. Much more. . ."

Much more something he doesn't even know the word for. For a second, he considers charging back into the library and paging through the dictionary until he finds out how to say what he's trying to say. But he shakes his muddled head and concentrates on hopping down the library's big stone steps, which would make the perfect entrance to an evil lair if he were still into that kind of thing.

No, he wants to be pleasantly surprised when the perfect word rolls off Senior's lips and sizzles through him and makes everything all right. He swings himself into the hovercraft, a spot in his heart beginning to warm up hopefully, and his pulse beats to the rhythm of _I'll-wait-I'll-wait_.

He scowls as he wrestles with his stupid seat belt, which is acting like it's magnetically repelled by its stupid holder. Waiting has never been one of his strengths.

()()()()()()()

The Gaston with skin like Hershey's chocolate is jogging across the double-page spread, half of him on one page, half on the other, which has the somewhat amusing effect of making it look like there's a staple in his right leg. But he keeps running anyway, because he's just that tough. Real men must do that. Men who don't cry at getting their blood drawn.

Peeking out from under the chocolate-skinned Gaston's heel are the type of tiny, very-black, thick-lettered words that he knows are just meant to correspond with this picture. And, even though he has to squint his contacts into super-focus to read them, they're so much less intimidating than the paragraphs stacked on top of each other he'd encounter if he picked up where he left off. It says, "Running or jogging is one of the easiest ways for a man to stay in shape."

_In shape_. What a funny phrase. He knows what it means, but every time he reads it he sees himself stuck inside a triangle or something. Now he stifles a chuckle as he raises one leg and holds it out in front of him to imitate the chocolate Gaston's pose.

The chuckle dies when he realizes he can't do it. His legs are about six inches shorter than the magazine man's, and the harder he tries to stretch them, the more his muscles cry out that he's asking for the impossible. Finally his balance is thrown off beyond repair and he falls with scientific precision, right on his bony backside.

He sinks his teeth into his tongue, bites away the pained yelp before it can escape. "Okay - jogging," he says out loud, to take his thoughts off the bruise he's surely going to have tomorrow. "Somewhere between walking and running. It's easy. Anyone can do it."

_Even you._

It's a nasty whisper from his own self that he hasn't heard since the day the UN pardoned him. Insecurity - as toxic as radium and not even shiny to make up for it - turns the whole world dark, replacing the happy golden glow he thought would always been with him now that he's reformed.

He tilts his chin at his doubts - they're invisible but still very much there, like ninety percent of the organisms on Earth. The only good thing about these things coming from his own brain is that he doesn't need to address them aloud. His lips are frozen shut, but he manages to cobble together a thought. _I'm going for a jog - to burn off that bowl of Fruit Loops I had this morning_, he informs them. A vine tingles at his neck, waiting for the command he won't even have to voice.

The poison shrinks back a few inches, like him cringing away from his mother's touch. It leaves behind a clear space where he can see, he can breathe, he can cope. It's a feeling of hanging on to sanity by your fingertips that he remembers well from his days as a supervillain. Back then, it was about the closest he ever came to a sense of steadiness. Now he wonders how he ever lived in it.

He tries to remember the science of it all, examine the psychology behind the human fear process. But none of it's coming to him, just the toxin, and he runs away from it, right out the door and down the street. Well, technically, down the _sidewalk_, since he doesn't want to get run over.

It's as good a way to start a jog as any, outrunning the stuff he didn't know 'till today can still turn him inside-out. He watches his feet slapping the pavement over and over, bringing him closer to manhood with each step. _Thump, THUMP, thump. Thump, THUMP, thump._ Makes a pattern he could almost hum to - if he felt like humming, which he does _not_.

He casts a hopeful glance up at the sky, searching for a constellation to navigate by. But God seems to look back down at him from between the stars, as if to say, _You are not yet worthy to hold your head high - _what did Shego call him once? - _half-a-man._ It was the kind of thing you could do as ruler of the world, which was one of the many reasons he spent decades trying to become exactly that.

Right now's one of those times when it's _really _hard to accept that he's not and never will be. Still, he lowers his head humilitaly, but the sidewalk's not very interesting, so he keeps his gaze fixed on mailboxes and lawn gnomes as his feet carry him onward. Once he reaches the stop sign, he - well, stops, and turns to look back at his house, which never fails to bring on a grin.

It's a nice house, rectangular in shape and sandy in color, like all the houses on Ward Avenue. He bought it because it was fairly cheap - and close to Shego's. And he liked the big roomy kitchen and the spring-bouncy padded stairs, but he hated the cookie-cutterness. Heck, even cookie cutters come in fun shapes.

Anyway, he wanted a house that screamed "Dr. Drakken Lives Here!", and his usual decor - acid baths, shark tanks, pits full of spikes - didn't sit well with the Homeowner's Association or his emerging conscience. So he painted the shutters bright blue, but when the job was done it was only a minor improvement, and he still had a lot of paint left over. And almost before he knew his arm was the one controlling it, his brush speckled the entire front of the house with polka dots like giant molecules. The first time Shego saw it, she laughed so hard he thought she was going to throw up or something.

It definitely stands out, though, especially today. It's a warm day for November, but it's still November. And with gray clouds starting to blot out the sky-that-matches-his-lab-coat and his friends the stars, and the branches bare and as scrawny as his fingers, the houses look all the same, even more than usual, giving the neighborhood a bleak feel.

That gets his feet running again, his eyes scanning his surroundings for anything to fill up his goodness meter. If he sees enough goodness in the world, it lets him believe there's enough in _him_ to counteract the part of him that still thinks it would be really neat to have the power to make anyone do anything he wants. The part that didn't just disappear when he reformed.

Even now, little details break through the beige - an appropriately blah word for a blah color - and their differentness pings reassuringly in his brain. A giant stone rabbit. A flag clanging against a pole. A statue of an angel. A house that's the exact same shade of reddish-brown as the few stubborn leaves still clinging to the tree in its front yard.

He remembers to look both ways and then darts across the street, legs covering the ups and downs of the sidewalk in strides that he can feel stretching his muscles, making them grow. Someone's managed to keep their lawn very green, even though all the other grass on the block is yellow and dead and stiff. _Thunk, thunk, thunk_, his feet pound out in time with his quickening pulse. The streets go by in a blur. Sunset Lane. Franklin Parkway. Lakeview Street.

At the corner of Schooley and McCorkle, his lungs decide he needs to stop and catch his breath. He leans heavily on a big solid oak tree that won't let him fall, taking in the crisp air and the smell of a fire in somebody's fireplace. (At least he _hopes _it's in their fireplace.) In spite of the nip that stings his nose, he's sweating through the lab coat in patches that give him shivers down to the marrow when the breeze hits them. His legs are still burning with extra energy - the only thing wrong with his job is it doesn't give him much of an opportunity to use up the bounciness he awakens with every morning - but his lips are wind-chapped, and he's _sure _his knees didn't used to hurt this bad last time he went for a jog around the block.

Panting, he wonders if his biological father's knees ever ache like that. Or if his back creaks and groans if he stands up wrong. Or if even he ever wakes up with a random crick in his neck that he has to hunch his shoulders against for the rest of the day.

He shakes his head, something wavering deep down inside him. Nah. Aging's probably as scared to cross Richard Lipsky as everything else is.

It curls bitterly through his thoughts, and he can feel his goodness meter falling. He resumes his jogging, faster this time, like maybe he can leave behind the only person on this planet who can make him forget he saved it. _Did you see me on the news for that? _he wants to wail, but his tongue's sticking to the roof of his mouth, thirsty and losing moisture by the second with his anxiety. _Weren't you proud of me?_

A giggle brings him straight back to the present, away from the long-ago pain. No one's standing nearby, and he rubs his ear for a second, wondering if he might be having auditory delusions. But if he strains his gaze, he can just barely make out two forms five houses down, sitting on the porch swing that everyone on the cul-de-sac has, and decides it must have emanated from them. His hearing's been extra keen - that's a really cool word, _keen_, and he wonders why the teens today don't use it more often - ever since he got his plant plowers.

Even now, he hears a woman's voice, sounding muffled as if it's coming from behind a cupped hand, saying, "Here comes another one." And since he's already determined there's no one else around, they must be talking about. . . him?

Another _what_? Jogger? Male? Mad scientist with blue skin?

"So," the voice continues to hiss, "scale of one to ten. What do you rate this guy?"

Oh. The rating game. Like back in middle school. He and Eddy used to play that, though he's not sure they did it quite right, because he never wanted to rate a girl below six to avoid hurting her feelings, and _every_ girl was a ten to Eddy.

"Can't tell yet," a second woman replies. "Wait 'till he comes closer."

Good. That gives him enough time to finger-comb his spikes into almost-neatness. Run his tongue between his teeth to get rid of any lunch crumbs. Puff his chest out to maximum buffness.

And put on his biggest smile, like he just happens to be passing through looking this good. He commands his eyes to look casually in the opposite direction, but he still catches a glimpse of the women through his peripheral vision. They're probably in their mid-thirties - a little young for him, but it's still flattering.

He barely registers an older guy - their brother? - sprawled lazily at their feet, before the second woman rubs her chin, and he has to pretend to take great interest in the birdbath across the street, breath held. "Hmm. . . " Her voice slides around thoughtfully, then falls with a flat, "Five."

He slams into it like it's a brick wall, hardly managing to keep his balance.

"I mean," she continues, "you gotta knock off a couple of points for the blue skin."

He's heard some variation on that so many times he should be used to it, but it still pangs through him. He fights the urge to clamp his hands over his ears. So far, they don't know he can hear them, and if they did, they'd. . . well, he doesn't know. He's never been able to predict bullies - especially not women bullies, who generally aren't kind enough to just sock you and get it over with.

"And he's too skinny for me," the woman finishes - at least, he hopes she's finished - with a disappointed sigh. With those words, she shines a spotlight on the gawkiness he noticed in the mirror this morning. All of a sudden, he's painfully aware that his arms are so long and gangly that his wrists practically hang level with his ankles, and he's not sure what to do with them to disguise that.

"Yeah," the first woman agrees. "Still, at least he doesn't have as big a gut as a lot of guys our age."

Somehow, this fails to make him feel much better.

Another whisper creeps its way in from the porch. Harsher, deeper, maler. "Look at him!" who he assumes is the brother cries in glee. "He runs like a girly man!"

Wha -? He glances down instinctively. Does he? Does he _really_?

He's never noticed before, but his legs _are_ awfully short and thin, so he sort of skitters like a nervous little bird. It's not the most masculine thing he's ever seen, though he's never paid much attention to the way girls run, so he doesn't know if it's feminine, either.

Now that they know they're being watched, his legs forget what they're supposed to be doing. His feet tangle together like they're dyslexic too, and next thing he knows, he's face-down on the mean siblings' driveway, specks of gravel biting into his palms. Before he even tells himself that maybe they didn't seem him, he hears their laughter.

The women's giggles are like hissing cats, and the man's between-the-teeth snicker isn't any friendlier. For the second time today, the hatred wraps itself up his spine, and it stings worse than his scraped-up hands.

At first he thinks it's the sting that makes him think the man's laughter sounds familiar. It's the kind of laugh that has physical power, the threat to beat you up, like the worst of boy-bullies. But it's also got a sly, clever edge that says it can get inside your mind and push all your buttons until they jam and you explode. Like the worst of girl-bullies.

It's a laugh he hasn't heard since the day he graduated from high school, but it seems to bruise every part of his body, just the way it did then. He tells himself that he's crazy. Paranoid. Completely mad.

While he's searching for other ways to describe his fraying mental state, his neck, obeying a command that he didn't realize he was giving it, jerks up and around, just to reassure himself that it's _not_. But he takes one look at the man's face and knows it _is_, and memories hitch in his throat and snuff out his breath.

The face is older now, with laugh lines around the eyes from years of picking on people, but there's no mistaking it. It's Carl Thompson, the biggest bully at Middleton Elementary. And Middleton Middle. And Middleton High. The guy whose idea of being merciful was to stick your head in a _clean_ toilet.

A prayer for help and a bad word spring into his mind at the exact same time.

In some distant way, he notices triumphantly Carl's hair is streaked with gray that has yet to invade his own shaggy head of jet black. Still, not a second later, he has to admit that his old enemy wears it, and the wrinkles, as well as if he pulled them out of his closet this morning. And he has the perfect body - broad shoulders, lean, muscled arms, a waist that neither caves in nor pooches out, long, strong legs. As for himself, he can practically feel his much slighter build shrinking even smaller, his teeth sliding out of alignment, zits forming on his chin.

He forgets his superhero self, his super_villain_ self - even his adult self. _Nothing's changed since middle school_, dances through his hysterical brain. _Nothing will ever change now._

Instinctively, shame stains his cheeks and he has the urge to duck his head so he won't get kicked again. Then the anger starts to rise, boiling until it something's beyond fury. The hate eats him alive, and he has to get out of here before he does something with it that'll send him back to prison.

He leaps to his feet and they carry him, stumbling and staggering, away from the house that he's just decided is the most horrific shade of dark green, like mold. Away from the Thompsons, though their laughter follows him, beating him up in a way fists never could.

There's no happy rhythm now as he circles back around the block. Just an uneven tread - _clop, stomp, boom, bash, scuff, stamp, crash_ - that makes him feel queasy somehow. All the while, his blood is trying to flow to where it's needed, and it pumps a terrible question with it: Did Carl recognize him?

Since they've last seen each other, time's put a little meat on his bones - not enough, but some - and sharpened his cheekbones; he's grown his hair out, gained a very obvious scar, gotten contacts and, oh, yeah, turned blue. Could Carl tell who he was, or did he just know the girly man was an easy target?

He's still turning that over in his mind - he's not sure which would be worse - when he pulls his body into the driveway of the polka-dotted house with the porch lights glowing to welcome him home. By now, he's drenched in perspiration, breathing like Captain-America-before-he-was-Captain-America at boot camp, and it feels like someone's clamped his entire left side in a vise. "Side stitch" doesn't even begin to do that wretched thing justice.

On legs that might as well be made of melted plastic, he makes his way up to the safety of the porch. It's a tiny little porch, just the right size for him and a trusted friend. Barely big enough to hold the porch swing - basically a bench suspended from the beams above, where he loves to sit, watching his feet dangle and dreaming up new science experiments.

But he doesn't head for the swing today. Through eyes now burning with humiliation, he sees that it looks as old and tired and creaky as he feels. He stands there straight as a yardstick, forcing himself to remain upright because he's pretty sure _real men _don't collapsed in a heap on their own doormats. Not unless they were just hit with a Doom Ray that liquified their ligaments or something, he decides, congratulating himself on his alliteration skills.

He bends over for a pant, then manages to raise his head, which feels like a balloon full of cement, and examines his reflection in the storm door. One glance at the sag to his mouth and the sparks in his eyes tells him his goodness meter's hit bottom. Plus, his face is spotted with big pink blotches, and he can't figure out why. Embarrassment? Anger? Out-of-shapeness? Embarrassment and anger _at _the out-of-shapeness?

Air coming raggedly, he rests his soaked forehead against the frosty glass and closes his eyes. He can feel himself curling up inside, like a timid hedgehog showing his spikes to the world. Only he doesn't have any spikes anymore, except for in his hair.

There's a roaring in his ears that almost frightens him, fills him with determination that that blooms in his very center and seeps outward until it reaches his fingertips and toetips. Toenails. Toepoints. Whatever. He can't keep it stuffed inside or it'll fester.

He gulps in oxygen like he's addicted to the stuff, which right now seems like another weakness, even though he knows that's absurd. "Carl Thompson!" The name comes out like spit, like something he can't bear to taste. "You think you're all th-"

But that sentence is too heavy with stuff from the past to be successfully expelled from his oral workings. It drives him back several steps and contorts him into a cower.

He grabs at the ripped-apart edges of himself, forces them back together, stitches them up with a trembling hand. He suddenly feels like he has a lot more scars than the places on his left cheek and right arm where doctors had to do the same thing. He thrusts his jaw at his reflection, whose entire torso is heaving in a way that would show off ripped pecs if he had any.

"So, Carl," he begins again. "You think things are just like they were when we were seventeen, huh? That you can just jump right back in and start mocking little Drew Lipsky again, because he's a nerdy wimp and you're a _real man_? Well, that may be true right now, but just you wait! A week from today, I shall be so manly that my very _sweat_ -" he swipes a hand across his face and comes back with a glistening palmful - "will consist of nothing but pure testosterone! Then we'll see who the wimp is! Oh, we shall see!"

At least the voice he can still hear bouncing off the trees in echoes sounds like a man's, deep and booming, if a little unsteady. And the familiar old rant is comforting, though he's not sure that's a good thing. He has to squeeze his eyes shut again and unfold his fingers from the fist he didn't know he curled them into in the first place. Even so, for the first time in months, they ache to curl around a Doomsday device. A certain coldness in his chest is fusing with the molten contents of his stomach, creating a rush of something that once made him dangerous.

No. He shakes his head back and forth, so fast it makes him dizzy. That's one thing that _has_ changed. No one else is going to get hurt at the hands of Dr. Drakken.

Not even Carl Thompson.

Of course, he's vowed that before and then broken it almost instantly as events whirled into something beyond his control. And before he knew what was happening, he had as much concern for people's safety as a character in one of those video games where the only goal is to obliterate everything that crosses your path. Shego plays those, because it's a healthier outlet for her anger than actually doing it to real people. . .

Spine squirming, he fumbles for something he didn't have when he was swinging between the juicy image of himself reigning over everything and the horror of some little girl nearly being squashed under things of his invention. _Please, please, please, don't let seeing Carl turn me evil again_, he prays clumsily, in phrases wobbly and rusted from underuse. _Keep me good. Oh, please, keep me good._

He repeats that until the desire to disintegrate Carl weakens somewhat. But proving him wrong - that's a whole different story, isn't it? Good guys do that to bad guys all the time. Kim Possible hardly ever touched him back when they were nemesises, but she always showed him that, no, his plans were not foolproof and no, he wasn't destined to conquer the world today - or ever - and it chopped a hole straight through his ego.

Carl could use a few holes of his own. And who better to punch them in than his favorite victim?

It's not his father's voice he hears in his head this time, but his own, nudging him toward the starting line of a race he's not sure his legs will make it through. _Go on, Drakken_, it urges him. _Be a man. Make Senior proud. Make Carl eat his words._

That's a really strange expression - and he hopes Carl's words taste particularly nasty - but it doesn't matter because he's groping around for God again. _Please-let-me-be-a-man-and-not-pig-out-this-year-s o-Carl-will-see-he's-wrong-and-Senior-will-want-to -join-my-family-and-just-let-be-manly! Please - I'm-tired-of-being-a-wuss-and-I-need-Senior!_ All of that spurts out in one mental breath that he hopes God can interpret, because a pause will surely break him.

No Essence of Manliness, carefully extracted and bottled, drifts down from on high to fix it. He hates that.

Well, fine! He's not helpless. Every muscle pulled taut, he stiffens his neck, throws back his once-broad shoulders, and marches inside, slamming both the storm door and the door-door in the process. The only good thing about not being a real man yet - the glass doesn't shatter and drip in shards onto the porch behind him.


	2. Karaoke Night - The First Challenge

**And here's the second chapter! Yay me! **

**I know my chapters have been getting extremely long and wordy lately. I'm not quite sure how to fix that, since I'm such a sucker for detail, but I****_ am_**** working on making Chapter Three more manageable. So what do you guys think? Way too long, a little too long, just right, too short (which I doubt)? At any rate, hopefully the English course I'm taking will help me learn to measure my prose a bit better. Thanks for hanging in there while I sort it out. :)**

**The occasional non-word is meant to capture Drakken's voice.**

Chapter Two  
Karaoke Night - The First Challenge

Day 1  
7:06 a.m.

He wakes up the next morning with hope glowing through him. It's Friday, the day that, more than any other, seems to come with a built-in force field that all the nasties bounce off. The end of the work week. Pizza for dinner. Karaoke night. Even knowing that he's not a man yet barely has time to drag the corners of his mouth down before the reminder of _Macho_ just waiting to spill its secrets to him boings them back up again.

He whips his covers off with a fun "flirmp" sound that he loves making and jumps out of bed, wincing as something somewhere on him pops and releases a dull, vague pang. Still clad in his PJs and slippers - he's really going to have to find a pair more macho than fluffy bunnies - he tears out of his room and up the rickety old attic steps that he wishes would, just once, threaten to bow under his weight.

With the lights slanting in through the uneven blinds that sloppily shade the porthole of a window, the attic looks safe, almost as welcoming as a lab. But he can't stop to savor that if he's going to complete his mission before he has to shower and eat and leave for work. It's the piled-high, still-unpacked boxes bunched together in the dimmest corner that catches his attention.

The box labeled "Photo Albums" turns out to be disappointingly stocked with Marshmallow Peeps that must be a good - bad - two years old. In an amazing feat of deduction, he tears over to the one that says "Old Easter Candy," rips off the lid, and is rewarded with several promising-looking leather squares. The top one's fallen open, and he leans in to examine it.

His mug shot glares back at him.

It sends a cold, dark shiver all the way through his soul. He can't tell which arrest this was - they all sort of blur together now. But it was obviously before The Big One because the face, though drawn tight in a scowl, isn't sunken and the sickly grayish-bluish color of deoxygenated blood.

He slaps the cover closed on the past before it can suck him back in and tucks the album warily under one arm. With the other hand, he paws through dog-eared cookbooks and filled-up checkbooks until he finds what else he's been looking for: A stack of _Sports Illustrated_s Eddy gave him when they were teenagers.

After he threw out the swimsuit issues, red-faced and guiltily intrigued, he hung on to them for years, just because you never knew what might come in handy for one of your schemes. Shego says he's a pack rat, but there are some things even she just doesn't understand.

Nestling them under his other arm, he descends the stairs like a little wooden soldier so he won't drop any, deposits them in the bathroom, then sprints off in a girly-man run toward the kitchen for a pen and a roll of tape. Once he locates them, he marches back into the bathroom, settles himself cross-legged on the floor, and begins tearing out pictures of sportists. No - what does Eddy call them? Athletes?

Not the ones that are very obviously on steroids, with veins straining against skin that's barely holding them in, because that's cheating and, for some reason, it makes waves of pain course through his neck. But he pounces on all the guys who are buff and chiseled and look like they got that way through good old-fashioned - manly - hard work - from the medium-built runners whose muscles aren't supersized but are obviously hard as sheets of steel, to the bodybuilders as big as Eddy.

He plants his hands on his hips and faces off against the mirror as if preparing for a showdown. Hands and hips are both so tiny that from across the room, he seems to possess neither.

Up in the top right corner of the mirror go the few pictures he found of himself where he wasn't being arrested or leaning sneeringly on a Doom Ray. Him the way he was before prison, that is - lean and strong, and at least capable of taking a punch from anyone less than a master of Kung Fu without crumbling. He briefly gazes at them - _wistfully_, he thinks is the word - before grabbing his pen and labeling them _Stage One_.

In the bottom left corner, he tapes up _Stage Two_, some of the athletes close to his size but fitter and tanner, their muscles more toned. A tan's obviously out of the question for him, but surely their firm strength's attainable, if a guy-who-can't-quite-call-himself-a-man-yet tries hard enough.

And there are the bodybuilders. Even as he carefully prints _Stage Three_ above the mass of triceps and sheer brawn, his spirit wilts a little, just because they're so darn _big_. But it blips out to the tune of his self-confidence telling him that if a random jock could grow that massive, Dr. Drakken can too. With his scientific brilliance, he might even find a faster, better way to do it.

He deliberately leaves the upper left corner of the mirror blank so he can analyze his current state. _Stage Zero,_ he decides with a crinkle of his nose.

He steps back, hauling satisfied breaths from his gut. There! It's real. It's feasible. It's scientific. Easy as pi - err, pie. Six days - super-basic math says that's two days for every phase.

So with his goal in mind, he's careful to keep his eyes directed to an especially muscular baseball player, whose biceps look like a couple of the balls he's trying to hit have lodged under his skin, as he drapes his PJs and boxers in a heap of fabric on the floor. His frame's flaws are all too visible even when he's fully clothed.

And it sends him in bounds across the floor to the shower. One foot catches on the tub-edge, and he can feel his body sprawling. Before he can land with teeth-clacking force on his chin, though, he's able to grab the shower-curtain-rod and steady himself. Phew.

He sure hopes becoming a real man will improve his coordination, too. 'Cause if he tries that stunt again in a week, his newfound bulk will probably yank the rod down smack on top of his head.

He'll grin right through _that_ concussion.

He grins now, and even succeeds in not shrieking when the first unbelievably cold drops of water spatter him from above. _Transient state, transient state_, he reminds himself as chilly mist envelopes him. Sure enough, within seconds, the spray's calmingly, steam-the-mirrors-up warm, and contrary to that old joke about skinny people, he doesn't have to run around in it to get wet.

All of that combined has his goodness meter overflowing. His lips part to savor the taste of pure happiness that he's still not quite used to, and an Oh Boyz song pops out:

_"You're my favorite gal, gal, gal_  
_And I'd like to be more than pals, pals, pals_  
_Been soaring like a jet_  
_Ever since we met_  
_Will you hold my hand - just one time?_  
_Let me look into your eyes_  
_Can't stop my heart from pounding_  
_It's the sound of love resounding"_

He tips his head back to hit that last note and is struck not only by the terribleness of shampoo running into his eyes, but also the sinking sensation that real men probably don't sing in the shower, at least not teen pop songs. In response to the first, he claws at his cheeks and expels tortured grunts that turn to gasps of relief as he finds the water and sticks his face under it.

But he's not sure what to do with the second, so he just snaps his mouth shut - and not a moment too soon because he feels shampoo trickling down his pressed-closed lips, too. It's an oddly quiet shower, so quiet he can hear the water rolling heavily off his hair and hitting the shower floor in bursts.

Once he's out, he realizes, much to his displeasure, that he's forgotten to have a change of clothes waiting for him next to his pajama pile. As someone that he thinks might be him grumbles streams of annoyance, he hikes his tower up to his armpits and lets his dangling arms hold them in place. He _knows_ that's too feminine a thing to do, but exposing a chest full of blueness and ribs, even to an empty house, makes him slightly uncomfortable. Especially today.

_You won't have to feel that way for long. Transcient state, transcient state,_ he soothes himself as he charges back to his room and grapples through a closet stocked with lab coats until he finds a clean one. Holds it up to his nose and inhales the steadying scent - dryer-freshness struggling to cover a chemical mixture that he can practically name and date. If he's not mistaken, this one blew his lab sky-high and singed off all his hair. Ah, memories. . .

He wriggles himself into his clothes and gallops out to the kitchen, ponytail still dribbling little wet droplets down into his collar. The magazine's lying on the table right where he left it - a rare thing in his house - its pages flipped open in a yawn. For the first time, he registers a shiver of doubt. After all, he has no idea what the six steps to manhood are. For all he knows, they could ask him to climb Mt. Everest. Which he just might be able to do with the right equipment, but he has to work today. . .

But what it _does_ say may be even harder to live up to:

_The real man is assertive, even aggressive._

That first word triggers a vague familiarity, though no definition steps up to help. _Aggressive_, though - he's definitely heard that, back in those old dog-training manuals, accompanied by a picture of a dog about three times bigger than his poodle. Teeth bared. Hackles up. Ready to destroy someone with the burn inside that threatened to swallow him if he couldn't find a way to release it.

It was a face he'd seen so many times. Not on Commodore Puddles. On himself.

But fighting - he's never been good at that. Can't remember the last time he actually took part in hand-to-hand combat, not really. There's been tackling and shoving and slapping of fingers - nothing that would count as "aggressive."

A punch should be so simple, a contraction of the arm muscles followed by a thrust, a slap even easier, but he's never successfully landed either one. The second any of his adversaries came within hitting distance, his joints would lock up and then his arms would no longer be under his control, flailing around for a machine to do it for him.

That's the mad-scientist way to be aggressive. Brain-tapping machines and cartilage-melting rays dance through his subconscious, and as soon as he realizes what he's actually thinking about, he nearly pukes.

No. No more of that.

Which brings him to another conundrum - a fancy word for "problem" that's tricky but fun to get your mouth around. He made a vow, the night the aliens invaded and he finally saw evil for what it was, never to hurt anyone again. No exceptions. He started his life of villainy with three exceptions, and over time, it just got way too easy to expand that list. Their friends. Their families. Anyone who tried to help them.

So how's he supposed to be aggressive without hurting anybody? It's like finding a way to swim without getting wet! Maybe if you melt dry ice. . .

But solid carbon dioxide isn't going to help this - _conundrum_, he thinks, the syllables popping in his mental eardrums. He tips closer to _Macho_, begging it for further explanation. It relinquishes once he can get his eyes, drifting to meet each other over his nose, to focus.

_While the real man does not spend his time picking fights, there should be no doubt that he would make quick work of any foe if provoked._

Ohh. Understanding slips smoothly into place, and he snuggles into its warmth. Like Shego always says now: "Ladies do not start fights, but they can finish them."

That sounds slightly more doable, but only slightly. He hasn't tried the tough-guy act for months, and he's pretty much convinced it wouldn't come now if he called for it. Even the faintest memory of being backed into a dark corner in Cell Block D makes his legs unsteady, his hands incapable of staying still, his nerves flutter in his stomach.

Well, this isn't anything like the role he stuttered through as a villain, he reminds himself. There's no need to menace people and have them fear for their lives. Just stand firm and refuse to be a victim anymore. He doesn't have to go around being like Carl Thompson. More like -

Kim Possible is the first person that comes to mind, and he figures she's a pretty good example of what "assertive" must mean. Still, he amends it to make clear that he'll be like _a very, VERY manly Kim Possible._

He immediately pictures Kim Possible with a beard and mustache, and he can't help but snicker even though he doesn't wish her ill anymore. It's just a funny image.

But how's he supposed to do that after years of all but rolling over and showing bullies his tummy in the hopes that they'll acknowledge his submission with a beating less brutal than usual? After decades of aiming lasers at anyone who was mean to him? What he needs is what Mother calls "a healthy medium," only most of his life has been so warped he's not sure he'd recognize a healthy _anything_ if he saw it.

He glances down at his fingers writhing uneasily in his lap. No answers hidden in their gloved boniness. And if he ponders it any longer, he'll be late for work and he doesn't want that at all. He wrestles his arms into the sleeves of a coat that used to fit back in his pre-prison days, jams the backpack on over its downy bulk, and flies out the door with a hunk of wildberry Pop-Tart still hanging halfway out of his mouth.

It's chillier today than it was yesterday, but the sky's such a bright, crisp blue it stings your eyes to look at it, and the clouds are cumulus, so they seem puffier and friendlier. Between making shapes out of them and attempting to plot out a path to non-violent aggressiveness, he misses his turn onto the highway. Which is easy enough to remedy in the hovercraft because there's no traffic up here, far above the cars and far below the planes.

Once he reaches the very ordinary-looking building that Global Justice uses as an entrance to their underground HQ, he finds some sort of peace waiting for him. A feeling of great importance pours over him as he crosses the gleaming white tile and pokes the button for the elevator, recently installed as an alternative to the tube system. For people who don't enjoy having their bodies spun upside-down and their intestines flipped inside-out. Not to mention walking like someone slipped a mind-altering substance into your coffee for the next two hours -

_Focus, Drakken,_ he scolds himself. Poking the Down button, he massages his chest, where a vague irritant is forming under the skin.

But when the elevator dings to a stop and the doors open and spill him out into the heart of Global Justice, he can feel the knot his unmanliness has pretzel-folded him into beginning to unravel. And once he sets foot into Lab 591, all the uncertainties evaporate like the steam wisping up from a flask in the center of the room.

He gives his hands a gleeful rub and dives right in. The smell of chemical mixtures that he can identify with one whiff. The rosy tint the world takes on when viewed through his safety goggles. The body heat of his fellow scientists bustling nearby, which is reassuring from a safe enough distance.

Through that mysterious wormhole of contentment, four-and-a-half hours pass in what can only be a span of twenty minutes. Next thing he knows, the bell _brrrrring_s shrilly for lunch, nearly jolting him out of both clothing and epidermis.

Reluctantly, test tubes are placed back in holders, protective outer layers are peeled off. He retrieves his Spider-Man lunchbox from the back of the room and zips over to the lab next door - _adjacent_'s the technical term - where they keep the lab rats.

His very favorite, a little white one with the tiniest, twitchiest nose and, today, fading purple splotches on his fur, darts over from the water bottle and presses his front feet against the side of the cage. The animal specialists call him L5234GH-B or something scientific like that to keep from getting too attached to him.

Too late for _this_ scientist. To him, he's Bunson.

He must have slept on something wrong, because he has to sit down in stages until he's finally perched in a semi-comfortable position on a stool. Once his tailbone's cushioned in the seat's padding, he leans forward, back crackling, and places his finger, barely bigger than one of Bunson's paws, over them, on the thick glass that separates them.

There's no astonishing breakthrough in human-rodent interaction, but he catches himself breaking into a grin anyway, maybe the only one he's aware of so far today. He remembers the first time he met this little guy, when Dr. Director was giving him the preliminary tour of GJ HQ.

She walked him down the hall in long, confident strides. He followed at a half-skip, half-bounce, eyes popping like a Chihuahua's with a thyroid problem, mouth gawking open wide enough to _swallow_ a Chihuahua with a thyroid problem. How could Dr. Director stay so calm and matter-of-fact with such amazing gadgets and chemical solvents and even the dark curves of the walls screaming of adventure? He labored for a more professional expression, but this place made DNAmy's lab, the best one he'd ever seen, look like the work of an amateur.

Dr. Director then showed him into Lab 590, the next-door neighbor to his soon-to-be-home-base. She flipped on the light, and suddenly the room was alive with scampering paws and long naked tails.

_Rats_. He placed every muscle on lockdown, so that the only thing allowed to shiver was his throat, down deep below his larynx. He'd never been particularly fond of the creatures, and he hadn't ever seen so many in one place except in illustrations of how the Black Death spread.

Dr. Director seemed to read his mind, because she launched into an explanation of how Global Justice used only the cleanest and friendliest specimens. He was weighing that against how sharp those gnawing teeth would feel sinking into his skin when she turned briskly toward him. "You can even hold one if you like," she offered.

He looked back at her with what he knew must have been disgust scrawled across every plane of his face, because she got a glint of mischief in her one visible eye. Questions had popped into his head the moment he'd first seen her - like _What happened to your other eye or do you just wear that patch because it looks cool?_ - though he'd never voiced them. His social skills might still need some word, but even he knows you can't just go around asking people why they appeared to be missing body parts.

"Of course," Dr. Director said in a comforting way that he thought would have made her a great mother, "you don't have to -"

A yip shot out before he could catch it, bringing with it the words, "No! I want to!" Well, maybe _want_ was too strong a term, but that old desire to please was thumping around in there.

No, it was something stronger than that. Because, as he met Dr. Director's half-patched gaze, he knew he'd do anything for this woman who'd taken him under her wing despite his past, and for her organization. Swim the English Channel. Hike the Great Wall of China. Even hold a rat.

Dr. Director pulled out one that she said was "especially docile." It was an albino, a mutant, which was fantastically cool and yet made the whole thing that much more horrifying. He kept his eyes fixed on a blinking bulb of the ceiling, cringing, waiting to feel those tiny claws scrape his hands -

But one miniscule - _finger_ was the only proper word for it - cautiously touched his own, and the rat climbed with some hesitation into his palm, like it was as unsure about him as he was about it. There was no biting, no digging-in of the nails. It just sat there, looking at him with bright eyes that bespoke intelligence, and there was no mistaking the connection he felt as he looked back.

It sent him into a flashback - a _good_ flashback, which was incredibly rare for him. He remembered holding the weight of a chubby pink body, surprisingly warm for an animal with no fur, and being as happy as he'd ever been, because his evil had been stolen by the Attitudinator.

When he blinked back to reality, he found himself smiling - a smile that quickly morphed into an O of wonder as he became aware of a faint but very-much-there heartbeat against his fingers, like the humming of a machine as it did exactly what it was designed to do. This rodent was so small, so delicate, he had to be careful - with one flick of his wrist, he could have sent it flying across the room. He pulled the life in his hands tight against his chest, cradled him, and their hearts only had time to beat together once before he was struck by an astonishing revelation.

He could feel the rat's heart beating trust. He'd been waiting for that kind of power ever since he was nineteen years old. And now that he had it, he wanted to use it to protect instead of destroy.

He had to take a minute and stand there and hold Bunson and just _be_ the totally new person he was turning into. He stroked the soft white head with his fingertip, longing to know the thoughts that surely coursed inside that tiny skull, and was stunned to be rewarded with a quick flicker of a lick. And his own brain got right to work forming a hypothesis: Rats might have been a little creepy, but they made good friends.

Things were so simple then, back when he'd first reformed. The world was a wonderful, wide-open place full of dreams that suddenly seemed possible and Possibles he no longer wanted to decimate. It was more than relief at not being constantly on the run that had taken the tension off his shoulders. It was the freedom of not having to prove himself anymore.

He still longed to make people happy, not because he was a worthless wretch if he didn't, but because he truly hoped he could improve their lives, if only a little. Making everyone adore him was out of his grasp - for example, he probably couldn't make both Dr. Director _and_ Gemini like him. Still, if he did the right thing, in time, the right people would have the right reactions.

The fear and the anger had been stripped away, leaving behind the clean, tender soul of the true Dr. Drakken. He was so sure that would be permanent. And now this.

He heaves a sigh from the pit of his confusion and flicks a glance at Bunson's chart to see if he's on a special diet or shouldn't be handled today. Nope, nothing like that, so he lowers his hand down into the cage like one of Global Justice's high-tech floating platforms. Bunson obediently hops on - they're good buddies by now - and he reverses the process, adding a "ding" when he reaches the desired level, just because.

"Hey there, little guy," he greets his pal, his normally ranting-resonant voice drifting into something an awful lot like a coo. "How ya been?"

Bunson can't answer him, of course, at least not in a way he can understand. Not until somebody invents some kind of Rat-to-Human translator - which, come to think of it, isn't a bad idea for his next project. Instead, the rat wriggles himself into a four-legged sit and scratches his ear with one back paw like a miniature version of Commodore Puddles.

He can't say it makes the whole manliness thing melt away, but it takes some of the edge off the fear. It's enough so that his chilly core begins to warm, especially when he sees that Bunson's ear is also decorated with two nearly perfectly round purple dots, making him look cartoon-goofy.

He strokes said ears with the greatest tenderness, not minding his tiny fingers so much for now. "Some dye explode on you, buddy? Bunson-buddy?" It's got a silly ring to it, and he lets out a light little laugh that, despite its deep rumble, can only be called a giggle.

Ugh. He focuses his attention very deliberately back on Bunson, purple blotches and all. "Don't worry," he reassures the rat. "It usually goes away in a couple of days."

He could swear Bunson raises a disbelieving eyebrow, Shego-style.

The thing so much like a giggle returns before his self-consciousness does. "I know I'm a walking counter example," he admits. "But, believe me, this is the exception, not the rule. I mean, I've done all sorts of flabbergasting stuff to my body, and everything except _this_ -" he gestures to his general blueness - "has worn off."

Bunson gives his thumb a thorough sniffing. The giddiness the tickly little whiskers provoke leads him to a land where joy must be shared.

Backing up, grasping behind him for the table and nearly falling over backwards when it turns out to be farther away than he calculated, he unzips his lunch box one-handed - pretty darn dexterous, if he has to say so himself. His hands instantly uncover what they're looking for - a little pouch of yogurt drops.

He rips the tab off and inhales deeply, and strawberry, banana, and blueberry all hit his nose at once. _Ohhhh_, yeah. It's such a delicious odor, he thinks he just might faint dead away from the overwhelming goodness.

Once he's fought back the urge to roll around on the floor in what he's almost positive is called _ecstasy_, he sticks his surprise behind his back. "Hey, bud. I brought you something," he says teasingly. "Yogurt drops!" He displays the bag with a flourish and can't hold back a grin.

"They make a very good substitute for dessert," he adds. His lab coat seems to be pressing too tight across his midsection, or is that just his self-esteem caving in on him? "I need to cut back on sweets if I'm going to toughen up." The words taste bitter on his tongue and burn all the way down to his tummy, but he has to say them. "You know - be a man."

He suddenly feels heavy, and not just fat-heavy. Weary-heavy. Gravity-pulling-him-down-when-he-wants-to-fly-heav y. He peeks down at Bunson, blissfully unaware in his hand. "I guess there's not a whole lot of pressure to be a man when you're a rat, huh?" he surmises.

Bunson neither confirms nor denies what he already knows. Forget a Rat-to-Human translator - what he needs is a Human-to-Rat transformer. Right now he longs to be a small rodent, bad reputation and tail like a night crawler and all.

He can feel another heavy sigh pressing behind his ribs, but he can't rely on his lungs to let it out without a wobble that'll definitely turn into the least masculine thing of all. Instead, he rubs Bunson behind his left ear, the same spot where his poodle loves to be scratched, and feeds him a yogurt drop.

Rats can't wag their tails like dogs or purr like cats to show they're happy, but Bunson's whiskery little face grows unmistakably grateful. The eyes that come up to meet his look like yogurt drops themselves, little cherry ones on a bed of the smoothest Cool Whip. Yum. And now, they're asking with cute animal-manners, why shame is even bleeding through to his shaky touch.

He digs his non-Bunson-holding hand into the pouch, plucking out sentences along with his favorite flavors. Once he pops them in his mouth and their round sweetness cracks between his teeth, he spits it all out. Not the yogurt drops. The events of yesterday. Inviting Senior. Richard Lipsky invading his mind, determined to ruin his life even as a memory. An older Carl who's just as mean as his school-age self. All of it amounting to the need to somehow force his lanky, klutzy body into manhood.

Once he's done, the ghosts of his shouts still throbbing in the quiet lab, he gazes at Bunson again. He's not sure what he's expecting from him - a pep squeak, like Rufus would give?

It could be his imagination, but Bunson's mouth seems to be drooping at the corners. And those red eyes aren't creepy at all anymore, not when they're filled with what must be sympathy. It's like they're saying, _I'm sorry, Drakken. I know how you feel._

He knows the idea of a rat being able to interpret that much, much less understand it, is probably scientifically unsound. Still, he aches a little less just getting it all out into the open where there's air to move around instead of fermenting inside him.

But then another thought strikes him, like an invisible fist out of nowhere - another scientific impossibility. _Do real man confide in rats?_

He's not sure. Certainly it must be more manly than screeching and jumping on chairs at the sight of them the way he used to.

Besides, he needs to talk to someone who won't mock him before he can get two syllables out and can't blab to his friends. Unless someone invents a Rat-to-Human translator before him, which quickly becomes a horrific possibility in his mind.

He pulls Bunson in close and leans over him, so that his forehead is only inches away from the rat's chin. "Don't tell anyone about this, okay?" he says urgently, hushing the boom as much as he can. "Even if you gain the ability to speak, just promise you'll keep it to yourself!"

He's pretty sure the creature nods.

A tickle of hope tugs at him, and he gives the silky fur one last pat. "Thanks," he whispers as he puts Bunson back into his cage.

He's barely gotten the fish-tank lid back on when the end-of-lunch bell trills right up his spine. He hawks down his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich and just-the-right-ripeness banana, drains the milk from his canteen so fast it leaves him with the hiccups, and heads back to Lab 591.

They're working with the Truth Serum in its natural, liquid state today, figuring out what temperature range it can be stored at without diluting its effects. The mixture's thick and sweet-smelling and bright pink - _fuchsia_, he thinks is the term. Reminds him a little of his Brainwashing Shampoo.

He grimaces with one side of his mouth and smiles with the other. There's always that just-sharp-enough-to-sting guilt-pang that comes when he remembers his past schemes. Which, his therapist said, is a lot healthier than being completely remorseless while carrying them out and then wanting to throw himself off a cliff when he stopped and thought about it later.

Still, that song he wrote to promote his shampoo was quite catchy, and he can't help but hum it as he reaches for a container marked "Plasmodium," double-checking to confirm that is, in fact, what it says. Certainly much better than the other raps he's heard - which are mostly little punks bragging about how tough they are and if you don't believe it they'll break your face -

_Doinnng!_

His goodness meter tops off, and in the overflow he finds the answer. He closes his eyes and there, waiting for him in the thoughtful darkness, is a picture, as clear as a newly washed windshield:

Himself at Karaoke Night - tonight! - wowing an adoring crowd with a song - a song of his own creation that'll show he's not to be messed with. Convincing them that he's manly and assertive, even aggressive. All without ever having to land a punch.

A guffaw busts from his mouth, splattering the lab table with drops of spit and bringing with it the delight-filled cry of "That's it!"

Dr. Greenleaf peers at him as if he thinks he might be suffering adverse reactions to these potent chemicals, and he's so glad he didn't let out a maniacal cackle. Still does that sometimes out of force of habit when a victory is at hand. "Yes, Dr. Drakken?" Greenleaf asks. To his eternal relief, there's still respect in the man's voice, and he allows himself a brief pause to absorb it.

"Everything's groovy," he assures him quickly. "I just figured out -" the truth of what he's about to say embarrasses him, speckling the tips of his ears pink - "something that has nothing to do with this," he finishes with no insignificant amount of sheepishness.

It leaks away, though, when Greenleaf grins back at him and says, "I hear that." Then it's back to the chemicals, but for once his thoughts can't focus on them. The brilliant idea he's been awaiting announces its arrival by setting every centimeter of his cerebral cortex aflame.

His gloves are too sticky with the remains of his lunch for satisfactory hand-rubbing, so he wriggles around in his lab coat and hugs his arms around his body and works to contain a squeal._ Drakken, you little genius!_ he congratulates himself. Brains may not beat brawn, but it looks like they're going to be a big help acquiring brawn. How's THAT for ironic?

One foot jiggles excitedly against the floor tiles, tapping out a tune for the song he's already composing. It's always so great when irony is on your side.

()()()()()()

He pops the last bite of deep-dish crust in his mouth and crunches it between his molars triumphantly. He always gets pizza on Special-Friday nights, and tonight is a _very_ special Friday.

His first evening of manhood.

And, as crazy as he is about his usual mad-scientist garb, a special occasion deserves a special outfit. Something rugged that projects a macho-cool factor and makes it obvious even at a glance that this is no girly-running, bird-legged wuss.

He combs carefully through his dresser drawers - stuffed with everything from boxer shorts to biohazard suits, not to mention the occasional '80s comic book - until his fingers find promising fabric creases. Crisply masculine, the solid-black pants he pulls out smell like storage and fit him before prison.

Key phrase there being "before prison." No sooner has he coaxed his legs into the proper holes and yanked the waistband practically up to his armpits than they slide right off his skinniness. A belt he discovers under his bed remedies that, but the pants still sag down, displaying his innie belly button and the hip bones curving out like the ones on one of those racing dogs he's seen on TV.

From his closet, he unearths a shirt baggy enough to drape over both of navel and bones - in cobalt blue, which he's heard is a very _in_ color this season. He takes a few steps back and surveys his reflection critically.

Not bad. His arms still seem to sprout from somewhere around his cheekbones, but his legs look a little longer encased in Death-Star-black, evening out his proportions a bit. He strikes a confident pose, because everyone's shoulders seem broader when they aren't caving toward their chest.

His face swings between a grin and a scowl before settling on a streetwise smile. Pleased with himself, anticipation running a finger up and down his neck, he heads for the hovercraft and practices his song the whole way there.

The low-slung tables and come-and-get-it bar-and-buffet greet him like old friends, forming a safety bubble of warmth around him the minute he enters. The Karaoke Room's lights are kept dim and muted to draw your attention to the stage, and just like most nights, he doesn't see the table before his toes walk right into it, and he lets out a rather unmanly yip. Fortunately, the woman onstage at the moment is singing loudly enough that probably no one heard it. Even at that, the throbbing in his foot is a familiar ache that, unlike so many others, truly does lessen with time.

With a grunt on behalf of his crampy back, he hikes himself up on a stool at the drinks counter. He leans forward at an angle that won't send him toppling headlong - got cocky once, forgot to check that, wound up with a nasty gash on his chin.

"Hello, Ozzie," he addresses the young man behind the counter, the one with the name tag that reads OZZIE in big letters. He's pretty sure he wears that just for him - he's not exactly a whiz when it comes to names.

Ozzie's eyebrows joggle, his version of a smile. "How's it hangin', Dr. Drakken?"

He considers replying "By a thread," but he'd have to explain that and the details are still sore inside him. So he shrugs and grins and keeps his eyes directed away from Ozzie's - they scream his worries like neon, Shego always says.

_Neon. A noble gas. Atomic number ten. Chemically inert and forms no uncharged chemical compounds._ He's repeating that silently when Ozzie gives the glass he's drying one final swipe and spins it expertly on the bar. "The usual?" he asks, brows going at the speed of sound.

He nods with utmost sophistication. "The usual."

Orange juice. He has a hunch most manly-men take something stronger, but only real experience with alcohol led to public humiliation, and there's nothing he despises more than that.

Suddenly tired and old-person-achy, he rests his cheek against the counter, polished so smooth he can't even tell what class of stone it is. It's cool and he shivers, but there's a pocket of welcome heat forming in his center, shielded by a protective bubble that keeps the darkness away.

The current singer's chosen lyrics reach his ears in snatches of cheeriness, smoothing all the places that have been crunched up and squeezed in, like wrapping frozen fingers around a mug of hot chocolate. Something about "walking on sunshine," which is scientifically impossible - sunshine has no mass and thus cannot bear weight. Still, he can appreciate the sentiment and the chipper way she sings it, and he finds the knots in his back relaxing, his head lifting high, his feet swinging happily, not even caring that he can only do that because his toes don't touch the floor.

Ozzie rests that newly cleaned glass, now sloshing with orange juice, by his hand. He acknowledges the kid with a flick of his finger, then tips back his head and downs it all in one gulp, the way real men do.

_Real men._

The heaviness settles back into his joints, making him sag mushily. Reminds him that he isn't just here to have fun.

He's on a mission.

He extracts the paper that holds his precious song from his pocket and scrutinizes it to see if it says everything he wants to say in an order that makes some sense. Pressing it close to his chest, as though he can imprint the words on his heart, he crosses every finger and toe for good luck. Even links his thumbs together, a trick he's learned never to try with his big toes.

The sunshine woman walks offstage amid enthusiastic applause. He springs out of his sag and the MC barely has time to say "Who's next?" before he's snatched the mike away - politely - and is left staring into these faces he knows so well.

The teenage girl with the purple streaks in her hair and her pierce-nosed boyfriend. The guy with the almost-shaved head who always wears basketball T-shirts - _jerseys_, he thinks they might be called - even in the winter. The chattering knot of women in the corner who must all be best friends. All of them titling forward, upper bodies pressed against tables, smiling the smiles he lives for, eager to see what their favorite formerly-evil genius has in store for them tonight.

Energy jolts up his limbs, and a grin seeps across his own face. "Hello," he begins, holding the microphone as close as he can without startling it into feedback. Calculated that exact distance scientifically years ago. "Today I wrote a little ditty I'd like to share with you. It's called - " all eyes are on him, to his glee - "'I'm Still Tough.'"

He takes a second to snap his fingers, getting the beat just right in his head. Then he lifts the mike again, opens his mouth, and lets the song tumble out.

_"Now there was a day when I was cruel, ya, a fool_  
_Got my kicks by droppin' kids to my sharks_  
_I was a mad genius villain and my victims were unwillin' _  
_You might say my bite was worse than my bark_

_Now I don't do that kind of thing no more, no more_  
_Thought I was walking on the ceiling; turned out to be the floor, floor_  
_Saved the world, yo_  
_New life unfurled, yo_  
_But that doesn't make me a push-over. . . or"_

His ears are vaguely aware of someone tapping their toe along. Hands mask mouths, smiles creeping around their fingers, and one woman has her hands up over her head clapping the way some of the people at church do. Confidence level rising, he moves into the chorus.

_"I'm still tough; yeah, even though I'm nice_  
_I'm still tough, even without a Doomsday device _  
_I'm still a force to be reckoned with, so don't turn up the heat_  
_I may not be a supervillain anymore, but don't you step on my blue suede. . . feet"_

Now some of them are out-and-out laughing - but in soft, friendly chuckles that tell him they find him amusing, not the harsh mockery he's heard so many times. He's not necessarily trying to be funny here, but it's better than being booed off the stage.

"_Just because I won't doesn't mean I can't,_" he continues, each word dropping in time with his heartbeat.  
_"Especially now I have this power over plants_  
_I may have a mother with a tendency to smother_  
_But I'm as macho as any of your frat brothers_

_I'm still tough; yeah, even though I'm nice_  
_I'm still tough, even without a Doomsday device _  
_I'm still a force to be reckoned with, so don't turn up the heat_  
_I may not be a supervillain anymore, but don't you step on my blue suede feet"_

His body's been bobbing up and down to an internal drum somewhere in his skull. Now he switches to swaying back and forth as he fiddles with his tune slightly to create the bridge - that bit of song that doesn't quite sound like the other parts. Feeling the rocking as if it's physical waves rather than his own movement, he's carried away to a world where volume alone will open the door to the potential of manliness.

_"I may not be as much of an imp_  
_But that doesn't mean that I'm a wimp_  
_Don't try to pick on me, you big old ox_  
_Or I will be forced to kick your buttocks_  
_I'm assertive, even aggressive, and I hope ya get my message_  
_I'm a man from my spikes to my socks"_

He practically screams it, pointing downward with his pinky fingers the way the rappers always do. He's never exactly been sure what that _means_. "My background singer just fainted but I'm not allowed to stop rapping, so I'll just point to her lying prostrate on the floor and hope the paramedics notice"?

Whatever it is, the crowd loves it. One lady blows a kiss in his general direction, and he gives her a suave wink that he hopes covers his blush.

_"I'm still tough; yeah, even though I'm nice_  
_I'm still tough, even without a Doomsday device _  
_I'm still a force to be reckoned with, so don't turn up the heat_  
_I may not be a supervillain anymore, but don't you step on my blue suede feeeeeeeeeeeeet"_

Though he draws out that last word in his best operatic voice, he can barely hear it over the whistles and gasping chortles from the audience. One man is laughing so hard he's literally fallen out of his chair and is lying on the ground slapping the floor, practically wheezing in his Drakken-induced happiness.

_They like me!_ he thinks with the beautiful pinch in his chest he always gets when he manages to demolish the house here - or whatever the saying is - itself just a baby sibling to what stirred in his chest when he stood before the cheering U.N. It's so much more filling than any of the flags he'd adorned with his face. _They LOVE me! They think I'm all that - and just maybe I am!_

He folds himself into a bow, clutching at threads of humility, which is hard when he feels this good. On his way down, he spots two of the chatty Cathies in the back. Whispering to each other with playful smiles on their faces, the kind women wear - he thinks - when a man has caught their eye.

A _man_? MAN? His gaze shoots to every face, and there's no pity, no scorn, nothing to tell him he's a girly-boy. _They believe I'm a man!_

It takes every last kilogram of his self-control to keep from sticking his head down the front of his shirt and checking to see if he's miraculously sprouted a thick pelt of chest hair. Instead, he wobbles up there, soaking it all up as if he's photosynthesizing. Which he just might be - there's still a lot he doesn't know about being a mutant plant-man.

The vertigo of things not being as they should begins to drain away, and his love for these people is so overwhelming - he thinks it could explode from him in streams of light. Just so that doesn't happen, he brings a hand up to his mouth and blows a kiss at everyone. "I love you all!" he cries, voice swinging upward in delight. "Good night!"

He has to push his legs off the stage by telling himself that all that applause will eventually start stinging their palms. If people can get athlete's foot and tennis elbow, they can probably get clapper's hand, and he doesn't want to be responsible for that.

As he makes his way back to his seat, he honors his adoring fans with flicking fingers and too-cool-for-school nods and even accepts a knuckle-bump from Ring Nose. He plops into his chair and lets his entire body tingle, the way it does when one of his machines blows a fuse with his hand still inside - only without the burning and the charred-bare scalp. Makes it impossible to sit still, even more so than usual. Both feet tap-dance in place and his knees jittering would rattle the table if he didn't have such scrawny little legs.

But none of that matters anymore, because he's fulfilled the first man-quirement - _ooh_, that's a good word, even though he just made it up. So brilliantly he might not even need to bother with the other five. He can hear Senior now, crackling out an "I am so proud," like he always did with Junior. He doesn't dare add the words that always follow, the ones that confirm what Junior is to him, but they still wrap themselves around him like the towel Senior once draped around his dripping-wet form.

A tall lady in a black-and-white dress with diagonal stripes that dizzy his inner ear in a way hovercraft rides never can practically floats onstage. She plucks the mike from the MC's fingers and begins to sing in a rich, soothing sort of voice. Something about a little boy who got hurt at recess and had to stay after school with the nurse and about the mother who promised to be right there waiting for him when he got home.

"_When you come home,_" she says, "_no matter how far_  
_Run through the door and into my arms_  
_It's where you are loved; it's where you belong_  
_And I will be here when you come home"_

Something nips at the edges of his heart. That was him when he was a kid, falling, getting shoved, scraping elbows and knees and every other body part in between. And his mother was always waiting with a plate of cookies and a mouthful of gushing and a cheek-pinch or five. Mortifying as it was, he took some comfort in the fact that there was one person on the face of the Earth who loved him.

In the next verse, the boy's grown into a man - lucky him. A man whose job has him flying all over the country and who has to call his mother and tell her he loves her and misses her. She reassures him just as she did when he was a child, that she'll be there to meet him when he gets home.

This time it's a surge of longing that's constricting his lungs to inefficiency. He knows exactly what that's like, too - stepping into your childhood home and being enveloped in the scent of freshly-washed sheets and chocolate chip cookies still gooey from the oven. Memories rush over you, highlights of your past that make it look happier than it was. There's the rug in front of the fireplace where you used to curl up and watch the flickering embers and wonder what made them crackle and spark like that. And, of course, there's your mother being close by, in all her obnoxious, squealy, eternally-loving warmth.

When he was a supervillain, he made his visits with Mother as short as possible, for fear that her undeserved affection would yank the truth from him. But now that he's not keeping anything from her anymore, he finds he has to pry himself away. It's hard - he's always hated good-byes, except to people like Carl Thompson. He feels a single tear teeter on his eyelash and warm his cheek with its salty wetness.

The song continues, and he has the stomach-sinking sense he knows what's coming next.

He's right: The mother's very old. She's in a hospital. She's dying. But she manages to tell her son she's going to heaven, where she'll continue to wait for him.

_When you come home_  
_No matter how far_  
_Run through the door. . ._

He doesn't hear the rest. It's drowned out by his desperate gulps for oxygen and something to take away the image unfolding in his head. He sees his mother, his itty-bitty little mother, lying in a too-big hospital bed with tubes running through her. An older him, holding her hand and whispering goodbye, knowing he'll have to spend the rest of his life apart from her. Her grip on him tightening as as she coos one last time that she loves him - and then going slack forever. . .

_I can't live without my mother!_ he realizes with a pang that runs him straight through, leaving a gaping hole in his gut.

_Manliness malfunctioning. . . Cracks in preferred mask. . . . Engaging tear shield. . ._

Sure enough, his assertiveness begins to erode in large chunks, and then it's swept away entirely by the flood that gushes from his eyes and down his cheeks to dribble off his chin and soak the knees of his tough-guy-black jeans. Sudden hiccups pull loose from his chest.

It's impossible to even comprehend the idea of a world where Mother's squealy voice has been silenced, where her soft little arms are no longer capable of squeezing the stuffing out of him. He buries his head in his folded-up arms on the table to muffle the sobs now pouring shamelessly from his mouth. His nose gets that pepper-up-it feeling and starts to leak its contents, turning his face into a slimy blob of liquid. Not sure he can breathe. Everything burns.

Especially the giggles that rise from the table behind his. He lifts his streaming gaze to see the same two women who exchanged significantly impressed glances over his song. Their index fingers are pointing toward him, their shoulders shaking. With the film over his eyes, he can't see if there's cruelty in theirs, but they're definitely laughing at him, and that's something he knows all too well.

From in front of him, a snicker. Then a choked-back guffaw to his left. Then the pitying whisper of a little old lady blessing his heart, from somewhere beyond his vision.

All at once, the room seems to be full of Thompsons. If they believed him a man for a minute, that minute's up. He can't stay here.

He leaps from his chair, knocking it to the floor with an angry clunk that earns him more laughter. Head looping like a roll of stuck film, he churns his feet across the room, swiping blindly at his eyes as he goes.

Not until he smells chocolate sauce does he notice that he's headed to the buffet, his unmacho cravings thrusting him straight for the dessert bar. He recoils and winds up spinning in a circle because he can't figure out where to go.

No safe haven materializes no matter how many times he makes the turn, and he's starting to attract some stares. Impulsively, he stumbles down a swath of carpet that matches his skin - pale-blue and beginning to wrinkle in certain places - and that stretches into a hall. His knees won't hold him much longer, he can tell, so he flings his hands out like scouts and they register a door.

He winds his fingers around the knob and trusts the structure with his weight. It keeps his balance well, but what he really needs to do is collapse, and he tips back to see if this is a place he can enter. The sign on the door reads "MEN."

He goes in anyway.

And once he's safely inside, he wraps his arms around his middle, trying to contain the weeping that wants to wrack his entire body. _Now, Drakken,_ he addresses himself strictly,_ you're just here to calm down and pull yourself together._ He doesn't need a magazine to inform him that _real men_ don't go cry in the bathroom. He can hear Shego now, telling him that only a total mama's boy would do -

_Mama_.

What brittle control he has shatters. He braces himself against the sink and heaves deep breaths, but it doesn't take away the searing sadness that seems to rip his stomach in half.

Gripping the porcelain, he twists under the pressure of pain and bawls in huge bursts that frighten him on top of everything else. He gulps them down like bits of burnt meatloaf but they crawl back up to his voicebox and fiddle around with his gag reflex. He can feel Mother's lips pressing coolly against his forehead, leaving behind an imprint of her care, see her tender hands pulling a quilt over him to soothe the nightmares away.

_Science_, is all his poor waterlogged brain can churn out. _I need science._

The density of iron, the conversion of Celsius to Fahrenheit, attraction of opposite poles - it all eases its way to him, until he's able to work up to, _Mother's alive. You talked to her on the phone just the other night._

He criss-crosses his arms around his shoulders, which are shaking and feeling even smaller out of the comfy, safe padding of his lab coat. Yeah - Mother's young - fairly - early sixties. She's healthy. Her side of the family - the Browns, if he remembers correctly - all live nice long lives.

That slows the tears down somewhat, but they don't cease to flow until there are simply no more to be produced. Limp and soggy, he clears his raw throat and, against his better judgment, chances a peek in the mirror. He looks awful, blotchy again and red-eyed, with a painful-looking wobble for a mouth.

He's splashing cold water on his face, in hope that it will revive his droopy cheeks, when a voice says, "Hi."

Just "hi," and it's a teensy-weensy voice, yet it nearly makes him rocket out of the too-big jeans. He whips around, adrenaline thrumming at his temples, and there's a little girl behind him. _Really_ little; she only comes up to his knees, and if he didn't have these runty little legs, he knows she wouldn't even reach that far. Her soft baby fat and bowlegged stance tell him she can't be more than two or three. Her dark hair springs up from her scalp in dozens of two-inch braids, barely managing to frame a face the color of those lattes that never fail to get him going on those sluggish mornings.

She's cute, he has to admit. But he's never been especially crazy about kids, and he certainly doesn't want this one to try and chirp her way into a conversation with him now. Not when the sinkhole inside is still threatening to consume every part of him if he doesn't feed it. So he grunts a semi-comprehendible "hi" in return and swivels back toward the mirror.

Fingers like frozen twigs, he slaps the tears off his face. Examines his salty-stained cheeks, which are very much not the hard, lean planes of manhood. Matter of fact, now that he's really looking he'd say they're on the verge of pudgy -

_SPROING!_ goes a spring in his brain, and he jerks into an inverse position to see if this coffee drop of a child is still there. She is. In the men's room. And she's even less of a man than he is.

"Um," he begins. "Hello? Er, did you know you're not supposed to be in here?"

A blink from the girl.

He yanks open the door and gestures to the letters that are currently swimming before his burning eyes. "See, it says 'Men.' Of course," he adds sheepishly as it occurs to him, "you probably can't read. . ."

The right thing to say is rapidly vaporizing, but not the power of speech, and he hears himself commence nervous babbling. "Well, you can tell because the little stick figure here is wearing pants. The woman's wearing a dress and has longer hair." That sounds a little shufflervo - chovano - whatever the word; it sounds too much like Eddy, so he quickly puts in, "Not that women can't wear pants - it just makes it. . . easier. And some men wear their hair long. Like me. . ."

He has to punch "pause" there and twiddle his fingers, which calms the bouncy ball ricocheting off the walls of his skull. The little girl stares up at him, watching his mouth, her own tiny lips molding what he just said. If she caught any of it, it's a miracle.

"Yer funny." She lets out a spurt of giggles. And baby-gurgly as they are, they download sound files of Carl's snicker with a sneer stuffed in, his sisters' tight, controlled titters, and the multi-octave laughter he just fled from.

Yes, he's funny, all right. Hilarious. The Slump of Defeat program activates, but he forces self-preservation to override it. That means irritation takes shape, rubbing like blisters, and he sighs it out. "Well, run along now!" he barks, waving a hand from her to the door. "Go on back to your family."

She shakes her head, the balls on her many multicolored barrettes clacking together. "No."

His jaw drops. "Did you just tell me _no_?" he demands.

It's a yes-or-no question, but she replies with, "Can't find them."

His vision goes wonky, and he figures his pupils must be intersecting over his nose like X and Y axises over an algebraic solution. "Can't find. . . who?"

She doesn't explain herself at all this time. Just keeps peering at him trustingly, as if he knows exactly what she's talking about.

It takes four or five good blinks to sort that out - he's not sure anyone's ever trusted him before in his whole life. "Your. . . family?" he ventures. "You're lost?"

She nods, and a groan gathers in his throat. "And let me guess," he says flatly. "You want me to help you find them." It's a statement, not a question.

This tiny person beams at him. Little-bitty teeth, so different from his massive molars. Next to her, he seems really big all of a sudden - and not bodybuilder-big. Unwieldy-big, more along the lines of an RV trying to compress itself into a parking space near a Volkswagen bug. (Eddy would be proud of that metaphor - or is it a simile?)

He closes his eyes, tries to pretend this isn't happening. His feelings have been deeply wounded tonight, he's mourned for his mother before she's even dead - he's in no mood to assist some little pipsqueak on a quest for her missing family. Why can't parents just keep track of their children and save everyone so much hassle?

Maybe if he stays like this long enough, she'll think he's a statue and leave him alone. But his lids feel like they've been turned inside out, all moisture wrung from them, from the aforementioned premature mourning, and they burn and can't hold themselves shut. His eyes fly open, and then he's gaping at the most unfair sight known to mankind.

The little girl's got her bottom lip all pooched out, and she's gazing at him with the biggest, saddest eyes he's ever seen. They're a deep green that makes him think of Christmas trees.

The exact same color as Shego's.

It stings him in the one lobe of his troubled brain that's still able to produce what Hank Perkins called "empathy." Shego, the almost-daughter whose childhood he still regrets not being a part of because he would have fixed it. She was once this young, this tiny, this - scared. He can't really visualize her scared, but something awful must have happened to harden her into the layers of stone that are only now starting to peel back.

What if it was _this_? What if she got lost from her family and nobody helped her and she never found her way back to them and wandered around for twenty years before showing up on his doorstep?

It's an idea that nearly makes him cry again. There's an unfamiliar stirring and before he can theorize on what it might be, he's bending down toward the tike and grumbling, "All right. I'll help you."

If she notices that that he sounds like an angry bull hippo - which are actually _really_ dangerous for being so funny-looking - she doesn't let on. She literally dances over to the door, which he opens and hesitantly nods her through. He commands his muscles to follow her, but his quads are having issues and seize up in a cramp. "Wait!" he hollers, but she's already bolted into the main room, the dim lighting swallowing her little form.

It sparks outrage in him - that he can't even make a toddler listen to him. Cardiovascular system firing on all cylinders, he lurches after her, willing feeling back into his legs. He takes a few stumbly steps before one foot lands sideways. There's an unnaturally elongated moment where his ankle sinks to the carpet, and then - all at once - he's fallen down in a jumble.

The gurgle sounds again from nearby. Severely embarrassed, he creaks his way back upright and is about to get to work rubbing the various aches when he spots his little charge - well, charging for a door topped by a glowy red EXIT sign. He inserts himself between her and it, arms flung out to the sides to create the illusion he's an impenetrable wall of a man. "You shall not escape!" he thunders. "I will thwart you!"

It's sheer instinct after so many years of watching Kim Possible wiggle her way out of some of the most ingenious traps known to the civilized - err, make that _un_civilized - world. A reflex that's been lying dormant for months and as soon as the shouts crack through the air, he wants to kick himself. You don't yell villainous threats at a little baby-child! There's being tough, and then there's just being a bully.

Slowly, it dawns on him, bringing with it an uneasy-tummy sensation: He doesn't know how to communicate with this kid. Evil monologues and scientific jargon are his only means of articulating what's twisting up inside him, and he no longer considers the former acceptable. How is he supposed to convey his message to someone who might not even be toilet-trained yet? Speaking in front of the U.N. was less nervousfying.

He takes a step toward her, two steps, three, stalling for time. But since no translator device beams itself into his open palm, all he can do is listen to the clear space, the one that helped him save the world, the one that's been silent so far today. "I mean - " he bounces his tongue off his incisors, trying to unkink the knots in it - "come on. I'll carry you."

Where did _that_ come from? His analytical brain begins to scroll through reasons this won't turn out well, but the baby-doll smile on her miniature face outshouts them all. She holds out her arms agreeably, and he scoops up her pudgy weight.

In the process, her aroma rises to his nasal passages. The folds of her neck shine with perspiration, but her sweat glands aren't mature enough to produce a stench. There's just a sweet stickiness that comes up to meet him, mixed with whiffs of that white floury stuff babies are always getting patted down with and the gentle sort of shampoo that doesn't blind you with agony if it gets in your eyes. That's how Stoppable's sister smells, and its purity makes him feel dirty somehow.

His knees are in danger of caving, so he locks his legs down tight. He considers hoisting her onto one hip but quickly recalls those pelvic arcs are scarcely managing to support his pants. Instead, he winds up positioning her on his shoulders, one foot - clad, in pink Velcro-snap tennis shoes that would probably fit his teddy bear, he can't help but notice - dangling on either side of his face. A couple of his spinal disks shift to locations they weren't meant to occupy, but he likes the feeling of her warmth pressed against his neck, like she's keeping it safe from the unfamiliar.

_Ooh, what a big man you are, Drakken._ It shoves its way past other thoughts and sits itself arrogantly down, squashing several innocent neurons. _The twentysomething girl wasn't bad enough? Now you have to be protected by a two-year-old?_

The only arguments that step up to defend him are "Yeah, but - Yeah, but - Yeah, but -" and he can sense nonsense noises crowding between his lips. All right. Time to take drastic measures.

He closes his eyes, cages up every letter of the mess in his head, then imagines himself pushing one of those giant red buttons he's always been fond of, obliviating them. Before the smoke clears and they have the chance to regenerate, he flicks his eyes open, tosses a "Now hold on!" to his tiny passenger, and zips across the carpet he knows so well.

His legs thrust like pistons, up-and-down, push-and-pull, in a definite pattern. Things gradually become clearer. The nasty businessman who isn't worthy of being called a father, the wise old friend who is, the bully whose reappearance out of nowhere after decades would do any horror movie villain proud - he leaves them all behind. Nothing can hurt him now, not as long as he keeps running.

Not until he hears the "Whoo-oo-oo-a!" bouncing around in somebody's teeny-weeny voice does he realize that (a) he has no idea where he's going and (b) he has a little girl on his back. Child endangerment laws smacking his face in frozen droplets, he screeches to a halt so abrupt he's not sure it doesn't emit sparks. "Sorry about that," he pants. It's a grudging apology, because anxiety's catching up with him and bruising his insides.

"No!" she squeals, bouncing her hands on his spikes. When he tilts his head back to peer at her, her eyes are gleeful. "Do 'gain!"

She plunges her stubby fingers into the scraggly strands at his "nape" - one of those words that makes you stand taller just knowing it. And then she does _it_.

She tugs.

With surprising strength for such a tiny being, she yanks at his ponytail so hard he parts with a few split ends. Every inch of his scalp comes alive with alarms, and bursts of energy crash into him repeatedly, leaving him wired but also exhausted, itching to fight but so afraid of getting beat up. In a moment of amnesiac panic, he snatches her off his back and transfers her to the floor.

His hands press her little shoulders with the same as-manly-as-he-can-be firmness he uses to flatten a lumpy sheet. His temper's pulsing in his wrists, and yelling what's sizzling on his tongue might relieve some of the pressure so that he doesn't explode. "Don't mess with my hair, you little - "

He chokes to a stop and claps both palms to his mouth as if he just belched in a five-star dining establishment, teeth cutting into lips. What was he about to call her? Pest? Brat? Pill? Any of the things Richard labeled _him_ when - over and over and OVER - he failed to be the son he wanted?

There's still stinging between his hair follicles, still hackles scrambling up the back of his neck, but he'd rather bust wide open than be like his father. He exhales, releasing the frustration like clouds of steam, grinds his teeth and forces out a mumbled, "Sorry about that."

"It's - it's just that I - I -" It comes out with a stammer that jitters around and then disappears altogether once he switches over to quoting his Global Justice psychological profile. "I'm extremely averse to physical contact unless I'm the one initiating it. It's usually worse with men than with women - or girls, as the case may be," he amends himself, confidence wavering slightly as he deviates from the script. "My therapist says I'm getting better about it, but I still have an undeniably negative reaction when someone pulls my hair or some such thing." Taming that into technical terms ushers him to a place safe enough to inhabit.

Yet when he glances down to see a twitch to one of her miniscule eyebrows, he knows that, once again, he's overshot his audience. He pulls his ponytail down over one shoulder and threads nervous fingers through the cowlicks. "Um, I get freaked out if people touch my hair," he explains as self-consciously as if Carl's lurking nearby, anticipating the success of his latest Drew-trap. Evil never came that naturally to him, and he practiced for twenty-three years. "Understand?"

She nods about twelve times, but he isn't sure she truly gets it. Still, she doesn't shy away when he picks her back up and sort of cradles her against his chest with one arm. At least from this position, he doesn't have enough hair for her to pull. That's one of the beauties of having a mullet.

But his vertebrae are _not_ happy with him and he, in turn, isn't happy with _her_. Darn kids and the way they didn't actually know things. He lets the side of his mouth that's not facing her dig into a scowl-hole.

You know, baby sharks are independent from birth. No snot-nosed munchkins hanging onto their mothers' fins and screaming "No!" every five seconds. Life would be so much more pleasant if they were all sharks - minus the incidents he's seen on _Jaws_, which were pretty obviously faked, anyway -

Those musings are cut off when the snot-nosed munchkin (in the figurative sense, because her nose really looks fine) in question pipes, "What's dat?" Directly into his ear, setting it to ringing in brash tones that jar his nerves.

He follows her point to a red squarish machine-type thing with four little slots in front that shamelessly beg for quarters. Behind their smeared-glass exteriors are words spelled out in glitter - "Angel," "Spoiled" - against a roll of plain white paper. He rolls his eyes. Cheap trinkets to finagle money out of some poor suckers. . . though he does see a pretty nifty skull-and-crossbones-set-on-black that would give even his less-than-brawny arms an aggressive appearance.

The child's obviously enthralled, eyes in such enormous, fluid pools it's almost precious. She's leaning toward the red box (not to be confused with the movie-renting Redbox) at such a crazy angle he's afraid she's going to topple out of his hold and break every bone in her itty-bitty body. He puts her down - more gently than he knew he could do - because she's like Bunson, so little it would be all too easy to hurt her by mistake. And, even as crazy as she's driving him, he doesn't want that.

She runs to the machine and adds her fingerprints to the cluster already smeared there at child-height. "What's dat?" she repeats.

"It's a machine that sells tattoos," he informs her authoritatively. That's a topic he's actually rather well-versed in. You don't get shuffled in and out of jail that many times without picking up a few prison tats. Of course, his were all of the stick-on variety, so his street cred washed off every time he showered.

It's somewhere he can't even go in his memory without tremors seizing him. So he shakes himself away from it and back to the little girl, who's just standing there watching him with her Shego-green eyes. Eyes that aren't following him at all.

He pushes out a sigh. "Little pictures or words you put on your skin," he offers by way of definition. "Most of them are permanent, but I think this type come off with water."

He decides against telling her that you need a needle - need a needle, that's funny - to acquire the permanent kind. Needles terrify kids. Heck, they terrify him - another aspect of himself he hopes to be rid of before the week's out.

She fixes her gaze on the line of glitter with the intent of a little scientist. He's pretty sure what skips through him is pride. But it dissolves quickly, like Alka-Seltzer in water, only this _gives_ him heartburn rather than treating it. For just as he lowers his guard, the tike pokes at the glass, seemingly unaware that the lack of distance is folding her finger up over itself, and peeps, "I want."

His feet weld to the floor. "You want. . . what?"

"Dat," she answers, pressing the machine again. "I want dat." She pauses and appears to consider this for a second before adding, "Pweeeeeeeeeease?" Her eyes go wider than his did that day he stood on DNAmy's porch, waiting to woo her.

There's something hypnotic about them. He's acutely aware of his hand diving into his pocket and resurfacing with his wallet.

When he whips it open, crackling the crumbling blue plastic he paid twelve box tops for, it's reasonably full of his prized ten- and twenty-dollar bills, yet there's not a quarter in sight. He rummages among the Hamiltons and Jeffersons to see if any got stuck in between there - but, nope. Just dust bunnies and a stray Cocoa Puff, which he promptly pops into his mouth. Stale, but still good.

The sweet taste he probably shouldn't be savoring, though, doesn't eliminate the dread in his heart as he pushes his line of vision back to the little girl. "I'm sorry," he says, and she's looking at him so expectantly that he really is sorry. "I don't have any change."

Her forehead puckers, and so does his firm state. "Those little round shiny. . . things," he bumbles out. "It only takes coins, and I don't have any. So. . . you can't get one," he finishes, hoping she can't tell he's cringing inside.

Realization flits across her face. Then, to his horror, her bottom lip quivers. And next thing he knows, she's hurled herself to the floor, fists and feet thunking it in a discordant rhythm.

All he can do is watch, feeling like an ogre. Funny how that used to be what he lived for.

"Don't. . . don't do that," he says weakly. The words catch on the way out, and he couldn't sound more like a girly-man than if he were fussing over a broken nail.

It doesn't seem to have an effect on the tot, either - at least, not a positive one. The shrieks rise in both pitch and volume until his eardrums must be scraped. Her cheeks are turning the same violet-red color as the blood that spurted from high on his own one awful afternoon.

"See, you only want it because you can't have it," he adds, quite logically. "It's the law of supply and demand. Helps keep our nation's economy on track. I'd know that because there are times in my life when I had to be a legit businessman."

She gives an especially loud squawk that seems to express disbelief.

"No, really, I was!" he snaps back. "And I was actually pretty good at it," he can't help but interject with pride. "Guess I get that from - "

Sawdust, poisonous sawdust on his tongue. Stifling the squeak of repulsion that begs for release.

And Little Miss Muffet goes right on with her temper tantrum, as if his world hasn't just plunged into blackness. He grapples for exactly where he was in his explanation of capitalism, but he somehow suspects all his knowledge won't bridge the language barrier between them. He and Warmonga communicated better, and she was from a whole different _planet_!

Anger curdles in his midsection. That she won't listen to reason, that she made him think of Warmonga - whose death he hasn't even BEGUN to process yet - that he can already sense the stares prickling their way right to him. That he's even in this position in the first place. This now-literally-snot-nosed pipsqueak shouldn't be his responsibility.

He curls his hands into semi-fists and props them somewhere on the long, flat line of his torso. "Now, see here!" he booms. "This is absolutely. . . " What was that phrase his aunt always used with Eddy? ". . .unacceptable behavior! _I_ am the adult, and _I_ call the shots around here! And I am ordering you to stop now!"

She spits out a "No!" as well as some actual spit that spatters his chin. Her germs seep into his skin, and his own face plunges dangerously toward mauve - which he think is reddish.

He makes a noise of disgust and steps away from her. _Some man you are, Drakken._ The mental accusation very nearly crushes his head from the inside out. _You can't even get a little baby girl to obey you._

In fact, the thought of just walking off and letting someone else deal with her is pretty appealing at this point. What's the big deal about a stupid tattoo anyway, especially considering that forty seconds ago, she didn't even know what one was? After all, he wanted the skull-and-crossbones one - and, yes, he's mildly upset that he can't possess it, but you don't see _him_ pitching a fit.

_Not over_ that_._

It's a clean place in the grimy cloud hanging over his head - the same neural fold that told him how and why to save the world. He glances back down at the tot, and in that millisecond, she blinks out, hologram-style. The images that rise up to take her place, bitter in their clarity, are of himself at one of his many former lairs, post-failure. Aside from the obvious age difference, he could be her fraternal twin, right down to the mucus.

He knows all too well what that's like. Clenching up inside, tighter and tighter and tighter, until some form of implosion is inevitable. Piercing the air with screams until even _you_ can't stand yourself, scanning the room for projectiles that would surely set things right if only you had the strength to throw them. Sobbing in broken whimpers from rage-shredded lungs, eyes and nose leaking of their own volition. Trying to pound the floor into submission and finally going into a hard curl, arms locked around knees, knowing it's ridiculous and childish - and yet also knowing you'll have to be pried out of it, because it's your only desperate link to not giving in.

Yeah, it's a dumb thing to get upset over, but she must feel horrible. A little twinge of that "empathy" thing pecks at his chest. It doesn't wipe the scowl from his lips, but it _does_ erase the urge to rip them open into a snarl.

It also drives his hands back into his pockets. He excavates the baggy layers, searching for something - anything that'll code itself perfectly in her brain and produce the antidote to her frustration.

His fingers land on a thin square that he extracts and runs his eyes over a good six times before he registers what it is. It's a sticker of a smiling cartoon airplane - eyes on the windshield, that sort of thing. It's from some doctor's visit that must have been ages ago, because he's been about three years since he wore these pants.

By now, the little girl's howls are peaking at decibel levels no human being can handle. He grits his teeth against the knot that tries to re-form in his stomach when he hears that, takes her by the arm, and pulls her to a standing pose.

She very loudly makes it clear that she didn't like that. But, with aggravation gathering at his edges, he squats down on his ankles to look right into her eyes, now as green and wet as a rain forest, framed by limp, soaked little black lashes. He dangles the sticker in front of her. "Hey, look." He's stunned by the warm, rich murmur of his voice. "I have a sticker for you."

The wails drop a few degrees with the effort it takes to concentrate on him. Her forehead purses into soft rows again.

"A sticker is actually _better_ than a tattoo," he continues, reining in his vocal chords to a secretive whisper. "'Cause it doesn't have to disappear when you take a bath, since it stays on your clothes. Even when it loses its stickiness, you can put it in a little baggie and keep it FOREVER!" He emphasizes that last word and perks his eyebrow at her, hoping she'll perk hers back.

She does, just a bit. "You - you want me to put it on you?" he ventures.

The kid nods, braids flapping.

He peels the sticker off its base much more slowly than he wants to - presenting it to her in one piece is crucial - and adheres it near the median of her deep-purple-with-lavender-polka-dots sweater. It's so very tiny that he knows if he spotted it on a rack he'd insist it was physically impossible for any person to fit in it.

He shifts his weight, now burning on his calves, examines his handiwork for a second, and decides he's pleased. "There!" There's a chipper bounce to the word that, to his surprise, matches the slowly rising level of his goodness meter. "I know it's not exactly what you wanted. But it's okay, isn't it?"

Another nod, this one with an awe that seems to add two inches and twenty pounds to his average-size frame. "Okay," she concedes with one last sniffle.

He straightens himself back up, with several painful reminders that he's not as young as he used to be - which is a very weird expression. _Nobody_'s as young as they used to be even two seconds ago. . .

Whatever. He waits for her to remember her manners and thank him, but the baby-toothed smile she bestows upon him does it for her a hundred times over. It's so big and so real, a gift meant just for him.

His own grin dances sloppily across his face before he has time to consider it. "See? You look much better with a smile."

The little girl does a brief analysis of him, then bubbles out a giggle. "You, too," she says happily.

The rough edges he so carefully sharpened for tonight are slipping, softening. It's rather pleasant, actually, but he can't see any room for manliness in it, no matter how hard he looks.

Then his eyes land on a vending machine pushed back against the wall, and he drools away his troubles. A Twix would really hit the spot right about now.

He meets the miniature candy store in an embrace and pulls away to study his reflection in the Windex-streaked glass. _Please, oh please, oh please take dollar bills,_ he begs it.

It _does_! He's got his wallet back out, a Washington poised between his fingers before guilt stabs into him that he already decided to lay off the sweets until his manhood is more secure, remember?

But he can't quite force the bill back into his wallet, his gaze away from the many different forms of chocolate just out of his reach. Well, maybe, maybe the girl wants some candy. And if she's nice and shares some with him, it wouldn't be polite to refuse, right?

_The girl!_

It strikes him like a punch square in the nose, and he snaps around to the tune of something that sounds like his father barking, _You have no willpower -_

And no little tyke by his side. She's gone.

His heart throbs its way up to his throat. A scan of the room reveals many small girls sitting on a parent's lap or playing those clapping games he never understood with their friends. A few doing cartwheels in the aisle. Yet none of them have her braids, her eyes, her smile.

It should be such a burden lifted to have her out of his hair in every sense of the phrase, but it's so very much the opposite that for an instant he can't feel anything except a huge knot of fear in his chest. She's out there alone, without even his fumbling guidance, and who knows what could be waiting for her in the shadows? Bullies? Supervillains? Kidnappers? An army of deranged zombies in gas masks - no, that was a _Doctor Who_ rerun he saw last night, and it scared the saliva out of him.

_Think, Drakken, think._ He connects fingertips to temples like he can harness the electrical impulses coursing behind them. _If you were a toddler, where would you go?_

He doesn't _know_. The memories he has of being that young amount to absolutely zero, and how could he be sure her cognitive process is even remotely similar to his?

He sags against the vending machine whose contents are no longer tempting. Thoughts without words scream somewhere in his consciousness. The loudest are his arms remembering how it felt to carry her.

Rubbery-kneed, he gets stiffly to his feet and skitters, in nervous-bird fashion, to the groups of happy people sitting around their tables. His eyes are working the room like binoculars, and he megaphones his hands up to his mouth to call for her when it occurs to him that he doesn't even know her name.

_The stupid kid _had_ to go and take off without even telling me that. And of course her parents aren't technologically advanced enough to outfit her with a tracking chip!_

Those internal mutterings downgrade the beestings of failure to mere itches, though he's not about to give up. Dr. Drakken never gives up. How many times did Kim Possible bemoan that very fact back when they were on opposing sides?

He allows himself a fond chuckle before returning to his duty. There are the magnificent springy booths, but no still-baby-bowed legs bouncing on them. The overstuffed chair that curves to your body, but no two-foot-tall figure sinking into its folds. The table long enough to seat about twenty people and its moving tablecloth, but no -

He holds up a hand to cut off that observation. _Moving tablecloth_? Logic says it can't be so.

Yet it's definitely flapping, and not from the heater's warm breath. It's being pushed outward, from the inside, as if somebody's toying with it beneath the table.

Do little kids like to crawl around under tables?

He's about to find out. Hope dangles within his reach, and he pounces for it. Now a hummingbird, he flits over to the site of the suspicious flapping. Ignoring the odd looks one lady with rings on every finger shoots his way, he flattens himself on his stomach like the king cobra the authorities confiscated when they raided his haunted island lair in . . . '05? He can't always keep these things straight.

Not that it matters at this point. He grasps two of the table's multitude of metal legs and slides himself, belly-first, buns-second, under. There's immediate pain as his lower back lolls into a position that defies physics. The only thing that prevents him from frantically scrambling back out is that he can see the little pipsqueak. And maybe her parents will be so grateful to have her back that they'll be willing to pay his chiropractic bills.

Quivery with relief, he props himself up on his elbows and scoots up toward her. He starts to grab her arm angrily, but the memory of Richard Lipsky's iron fingers clamping around his wrist softens his grip.

"_There_ you are!" he whisper-hollers. "I've been looking all over for you!" He hardly recognizes his own voice, thin and crackly and verging on shrill. Seeing her safely right in front of him, the full-bodied boom he always relied on couldn't find its way back.

No answer is forthcoming from the child-creature, so he exhales heavily and motions toward a drape of tablecloth signifying the nearest exit point. "Come on," he instructs her. "Follow me."

She studies him as if he's one of those find-the-camouflaged-animal books. "Why?" she peeps.

He gnaws the inside of his cheek to prevent a "Because I said so!" from leaping out. That never works. "'Cause," he finally replies in his most reasonable tone, "tables weren't made to be crawled around under. You have to come out."

"Why?"

Irritated blood gathers in hammers in his ears, and he runs a hand down the back of his neck, where his hackles are stabbing like the Lipsky cheekbones. "Because. . . because. . ." He feels pink patches developing at random on his skin. Needs an idea, needs an idea, so when one does timidly speak up, he snatches it and makes off with it.

". . . because if you don't, the under-the-table monster will get you." The boom returns then, and he drops it to ghost-stories-by-the-campfire level, even though he's never sat around a campfire once in his life.

Wariness expands her eyes, but there's a playful twinkle in them, too. The same ready-for-adventure spirit Shego must have had at that age.

That thought lowers his shields, just a bit, and he treats her to an exaggerated nod. "Oh, yes, it's true," he says soberly. "He's got giant red eyes - " He spreads his hands wide in front of his own ocular orbs - "and big hairy feet -" here he twinkles his fingers in the air to indicate vast size and digs deep into his most delicious leftover deviousness - "and he's right behind you!"

She squeals as if in terror. A massive grin, however, overwhelms her tiny face. His own stretches to match it as he cries, "I'm going to get you!" and executes a lunge that deliberately falls short of her. She spins away with surprising dexterity for a being whose tread's more of a waddle than anything else.

And he's having way more fun than he ought to be. He lifts his arms as far as they'll go under a three-foot-high table and drawls out, "I'm going to ticccckllle yooou!", sounding remarkably like Herman Munster, if he has to say so himself.

She gurgles with delight again and bounds through the near-perfect Isosceles triangle formed where the table's supporting beams merge with the legs. He makes another grab at her, putting on his best goofy-scary face - though Shego always said _all_ his scary faces were goofy - when suddenly something impedes his motion. He dangles off the ground, arms churning in a pretty darn good breaststroke but getting nowhere fast.

It takes him a minute to puzzle out what's happened. He's stuck in the triangle, shoulders wedged between the crossbars his little companion hopped so easily through. That boosts his self-esteem somewhat, but before he even has a chance to celebrate, the curled-up beginnings of panic shove his shoulder breadth aside.

He's never particularly liked closed-in spaces, but he's not claustrophobic unless he's trapped in them, and then it isn't pretty. The girl-child watches at a distance too close for his fussbudget nerves, head cocked in questioning. Only the cringe-inducing idea of her witnessing him suffer a breakdown restrains him to a few whimpered grunts.

"Okay," he assures both of them as evenly as he can. "I'm a little stuck right now. . . and it isn't funny!" he adds harshly as giggles bound forth out of her. "Still, I think if I can reverse my trajectory and convert potential energy to kinetic, I can get out." The metal that stores coolness even on the hottest days is frigid against his neck, and he can't keep his teeth from clacking as he swims his gaze over her face. "But I won't be able to hold you or anything," he gets out in a squeeze. "So I need you to promise to come to me. 'Cause if I can't find you, I can't help you. Promise?"

The carefully constructed speech turns watery on those last few letters. Solemn as a teeny-weeny scientist, she nods. And so, with nothing to go on except the word of a tot - not even really the _word_, since she didn't actually say anything -

No, there's no time to pore over that now. He secures a foot on the web, tough as steel, that holds him captive and psyches himself up into a brave "One. . . two. . ." _Please don't let this hurt_, he pleads upward before crying "Three!", sucking backup oxygen and locking it inside, flattening his body into as two-dimensional a figure as possible. He feels himself pull loose - there's a moment where his ears catch, but they're soon peeled forward in cruel folds, and he's somersaulting out from under the table.

The smooth conversation between two clumps of seated people is promptly extinguished as he lands in their midst, everything below his pelvis dog-eared over his upper parts. Bubbles pop in his joints, taking his He-Man aspirations with them. He must look like a squid - no, a squid's arms are lined up all nice and neat - like an octopus with tentacles flopping in every direction, the way his long arms and short legs surely are now. His feet are right there in his line of vision, bowed into a split over his head, the tips of the polka-dotted boxers offered up for observation.

It hurts.

He's considering retracting into the loose folds of his baggy apparel and hoping they assume he simply disintegrated when he hears a twitter. The kind of noise a baby bird would make if it were tickled. He throws a glance upward and sees a tiny speck of humanity, decorated with sneaker-sparkles and pink-like-a-sunburned-zebra-striped socks and a very familiar sticker. A small measure of something warm and good trickles into his meter, whisking away the embarrassment.

"Okay?" she asks, brows bunched.

"Yes," he replies stiffly. "Yes, I believe so." He gingerly rocks his lower half to the floor and muffles the "Auugh" that groans up from his muscles.

Her round little tummy wobbles a bit as she shifts her body from side to side, revealing a belly button about the size of an electron. "I comed," she says.

She sounds so earnest that he works up a smile. "You did comed." He jacks himself on his hands and lets the sore spots of sinew and spine and ego settle back into place. "Thank you." It'll make a nice memory, him taking in the girl who did just what she said she would do. Dr. Drakken may have his faults, but he never forgets it when people keep a promise to him.

He isn't sure if it's manly, but he wants to reward her in some way. Except that he has nothing to give her, nothing that'll mean anything to her. All he can do is let a softness rest on his face and tell her, "That was good. You did a good thing."

It seems sort of lame to him, yet her own face glimmers as if he's trusted her with samples of real nitroglycerin. And it comes to him in a happy rush that that's what _he'll_ look like when he wins Senior's praise.

The thought that it's a question of "if," not a matter of "when" isn't there long enough to sink its fangs into him. Instead, he focuses on rearranging himself into proper kneeling posture so he can look straight into her eyes. Adopts his sternest expression, his eyebrow pulled into a severe line. It never scared Kim Possible, but maybe it'll show his new little friend he means business.

"I'm glad you came like you promised," he repeats, in his persuading-Commodore-Puddles-into-the-bathtub voice. "But you shouldn't have run away in the first place." He swallows what's left of his fear, fighting not to picture what could have happened to her in those few minutes. Those few minutes when he was distracted by candy, ravenous pig that he is. "See, you could've gotten lost from me - and then you'd be lost SQUARED!" he cries over thumbtack-sticks of guilt.

She blinks at him from a world that has not yet experienced the joy of exponents. Poor kid.

Okay, so he needs to simplify a bit. "To the second power?"

More blankness that must replicate his own, drains his mouth dry from cuspids to tonsils. His head is such a puddle of conflicting emotions, tension lifting only to build back up again, that everything not directly related to science and mathematics is being evacuated.

He gathers up saliva and clarity. "Two?" he ventures, displaying the appropriate number of fingers. You can't get much more basic than that.

Dawn breaks on her face, as though what he's said means something to her at last. "I two!" she cries cheerfully, holding up her own digits for comparison.

"That's. . . great," he replies, not quite as exasperatedly as he'd like. "I'm forty-two."

Her eyes grow like a sponge in water. He tries to stiffen himself against their kitty-cat depths, but all he manage to think is that they perfectly match his forest-green crayon. Snarly manliness darts out of reach, stranding him in unfamiliar territory.

He extends a hand, a willing gesture this time. "Come on. Let's see if we can get you found," he says, the upbeat sparkle he no longer has to strain for playing through his vowels.

She doesn't hesitate for a heartbeat before her hand accepts the companionship of his and slides right in. Her hand is tiny even in his, and baby-soft to his calloused one. Little dimples where the knuckles should be. He senses something in his heart unlocking.

"So what's your name anyway?" he inquires of this tot who he knows almost nothing about. His voice dips down into some tender tone that he almost never uses. The hardened scab he was able to macho-fy over tonight's cuts and scrapes is hanging on by a thread.

And yet, he has to admit to himself, it doesn't hurt. Not even a bit.

She answers him with something that sounds like "Aaa in." And plainly expects him to. . . eh-heh. . . understand.

He shakes his head, frowns, studies her thoroughly. "No, you don't look like an Ahmed to me. More like a. . . a. . ."

A what? He's bad enough at remembering names, much less _assigning_ them. He casts one last look at the tiny, tiny fingers curled around his glove, with the nails like infinitesimal droplets of molten glass left to cool.

"You're so. . . _little_," he says at long last. "Like that nanobot I made once." He nods as an idea locks into position in his brain. "I'm going to call you Nano."

She shows no signs of having understood, but she giggles and declares him funny again, and he's okay with that. Some of his confidence returns then, but not the overblown kind that used to make him, as Shego puts it, "too big for his britches." Right now, he feels. . . just big enough for his britches. Except that they keep right on riding down his hips anyway.

Nano sets the pace at a skip and he follows suit, just for the heck of it. Brave explorers, both of them, they encounter a water fountain, where they both gulp refreshing mouthfuls - and a window, whose November-chill they press their noses against for a view of the stars, seemingly pinned in the black sky - and a spot where the carpet's rubbed away to a tacky putty, which dangles in the most marvelicious strings from their fingers. It's fun and light and safe, as if he's allotting himself one more night of being a child before he gets down to brass tacks.

He puzzles over that phrase while Nano occupies herself with a crumb-carrying ant about the size of her pinky. He doesn't quite get what tacks have to do with serious business, and he's certainly never seen a brass one. Surely they would be shiny and special, but as for how they relate to his manliness quotient -

There's no time to ponder that any further, though, because Nano gets bored with the ant and grabs his hand again. Then they're off, leaving the vexing subject behind them in a cloud of dust he hopes it chokes on. They pass the stage, and it's got on its special silver lights that turn everything incandescent. Nano stops dead in her tracks at its impressiveness. He doesn't really blame her.

Especially since the man at the mike's wearing a striped-straight-up-and-down suit and the universe's biggest pair of sunglasses. In a clowny voice, he sings, "There were ten in the bed and the little one said. . ."

Oh. He remembers this song from when _he_ was nanobot-small. The tune starts to hum its away around in his mouth reflexively, a pleasant buzz thrumming at his lips. So when Nano plunks her little behind to the floor, arranges her legs criss-cross-applesauce, clearly settling in to stay awhile, there's only a momentary nibble of frustration. It's just enough time for him to scowl at the hands on his watch before forfeiting his analog-to-digital conversion, surrendering to his kid-self, and plopping down beside her.

His bones don't adjust as easily as her much newer models, and it's hard to precisely configure his legs since they're so lost in the black jeans. He's just gotten himself situated when Nano crawls over and scrambles into his lap.

Just climbs right on, as if he's some cuddly Santa at a department store. He waits for the anxiety to fold him inside-out, but it's actually sort of. . . nice. It's as if he's found a spring so bountiful his goodness meter can't even contain it all.

"So they all rolled over, and one fell out," sings the man in the striped suit and si

**()()()()**

**The song that sets Drakken bawling is "When You Come Home" by Mark Schultz. All rights reserved and all that. And would anyone like to guess the significance of Mama Lipsky's maiden name?**


End file.
